This was certainly not what Elizabeth had expected of the Irish

campaign, which had opened with such a flourish of trumpets, and we

cannot wonder that her anger was fierce and deep-seated. No sooner had

she received the intelligence, than she forbade the conclusion of any

treaty whatsoever.

Convinced that his enemies now had the entire ear of the Queen, Essex

sought safety in once more disobeying Elizabeth's express command. With

a train of only six followers, which in the indictment against him

afterwards grew into a body of 200 picked men, he crossed to England

to attempt his own justification, rode direct to Nonsuch Palace, where

Elizabeth then was, forced all the doors, and, travel-stained as he

was, threw himself on his knees before the Queen, whom he surprised in

her bed-chamber, with her hair undressed, at ten o'clock in the morning

of the 28th of September.

It is a strong proof of the power which his personality still retained

over Elizabeth, that at the first moment she felt nothing but pleasure

in seeing him. As soon as he had changed his clothes, he was admitted

to an audience, which lasted an hour and a half. As yet all seemed

well. He dined at the Queen's table and told her about Ireland and its

people. But in the evening he was "commanded to keep his chamber" until

the lords of the Council should have spoken with him; and a few days

later he was confined to York House, with his friend the Lord Keeper,

however, for his gaoler.

He presently fell ill, when it appeared that the Queen had by no means

forgotten her former tenderness for him. In the middle of December she

sent eight physicians to consult as to his case. They despaired of his

life, but he recovered.

While matters thus looked very black for Essex, his nearest friends

also were, of course, in disgrace. In a letter from Rowland Whyte to

Sir Robert Sidney (dated October 11, 1599), we find the following

significant statement: "My Lord _Southhampton_, and Lord _Rutland_ come

not to the court; the one doth but very seldome; they pass away the

Tyme in _London_ merely in going to Plaies euery day."[3] Southampton

had married a cousin of Essex, and Rutland a daughter of Lady Essex by

her first marriage with Sir Philip Sidney; so that both were in the

same boat with their more distinguished kinsman.

On the 5th of June 1600, Essex was brought to trial--not before the

Star Chamber, but, by particular favour, before a special court,

consisting of four earls, two barons, and four judges, which assembled

at the Lord Keeper's residence, York House, the general public being

excluded. The procedure was mainly dictated by the Queen's wish to

justify the arrest of Essex in the face of public opinion, which

idolised him and regarded him as a martyr.

[1] James Spedding: _Letters and Life of Francis Bacon_, i. 371.

[2] Gosse: _Raleigh_, p. 113.

[3] A. Collins: _Letters and Memorials of State_, ii. 132.

IV

_THE FATE OF ESSEX AND SOUTHAMPTON_

The indictment did not press too severely upon Essex, did not as yet

seek to discover treasonable motives for his inactivity in Ireland, but

simply dwelt upon his disobedience to the Queen's commands, and the

dangerous and dishonourable agreement with Tyrone. Francis Bacon had

not been allotted any part in the proceedings; but on his writing to

the Queen and expressing his desire to serve her in this conjuncture,

he was assigned the quite subordinate task of calling Essex to account

for his indiscretion in accepting the dedication, in unbefitting

terms, of a political pamphlet written by a certain Dr. Hayward. Bacon

exceeded his instructions by dwelling at length on certain passionate

expressions in a letter from Essex to the Lord Keeper, in which he had

spoken of the hardness of the Queen's heart and compared her princely

wrath to a tempest. A man who was less nervously anxious to retain the

Queen's favour would have declined this commission on the ground of his

close relations with Essex; Bacon begged for it, went farther than it

required him to go, and is scarcely to be believed when he afterwards,

in his _Apology_, represents himself as actuated by the wish ultimately

to be of service to Essex with the Queen. Still, he evidently had not

ceased to regard a reconciliation between Elizabeth and Essex as the

most probable result, and he may perhaps have done his best in private

conversations to soften the Queen's resentment.

The sentence passed by the Lord Keeper was the not very severe one that

Essex should, in the meantime, be deprived of all his offices, and

remain a prisoner in Essex House "till it shall please her Majesty to

release both this and all the rest."

Bacon, who still did not think Essex irretrievably lost, now tried,

in a carefully worded letter to him, to explain his attitude, and at

once received from his magnanimous friend a forgiveness which was

scarcely deserved. Bacon declared that, next to the interests of the

Queen and the country, those of Essex always lay nearest his heart;

and he now composed two documents: first, a very judicious letter,

which Essex was partly to re-write and then to send to the Queen,

and next a fictitious letter, a masterpiece of diplomacy, purporting

to have been written by his brother, Anthony Bacon, Essex's faithful

adherent, to Essex himself. This letter, and Essex's reply to it, which

prove to admiration Bacon's talent for reproducing the styles of two

such different men, were to be copied by them respectively, and to be

brought to the knowledge of the Queen, on whom they would no doubt

produce the desired impression. With Machiavellian subtlety, these

letters are carefully framed so as to place Francis Bacon himself in

the light which should most appeal to the Queen: Essex is represented

as regarding him as entirely won over to her side, and Anthony

expresses the hope that she will show him the favour he has deserved

"for that he hath done and suffered."

Bacon did not succeed in inducing Elizabeth to restore Essex to his

former position in her favour. In August, a couple of months after the

date of the sentence, he was placed at full liberty; but access to

Elizabeth's person was denied him, and he was bidden to regard himself

as still in disgrace. The consequence was that few now came about him

except the members of his own family. Add to this, that he was over

head and ears in debt, and that his monopoly of sweet wines, which

had been his chief source of income, and on the renewal of which his

financial rescue depended, ran out in the following month.

He wavered between fear and hope, and was forever "shifting from sorrow

and repentance to rage and rebellion so suddenly, as well proveth him

devoid of good reason as of right mind." At one moment he is appealing

to the Queen with the deepest humility in flattering letters, and

at the next he is speaking of her--so his friend Sir John Harington

reports--as "became no man who had _mens sana in corpore sano_."

Then came the catastrophe. His sources of income were cut off, and his

hope of the Queen's relenting was broken. He was convinced--without

reason, as it appears--that his enemies at court, who had deprived him

of his wealth, had now laid a plot to deprive him of his life as well.

He imagined, too, that Sir Robert Cecil was weaving intrigues to bring

about the nomination of the Infanta of Spain as Elizabeth's successor;

and in his desperation he began to nurse the illusion that it was as

necessary for the welfare of the state as for his own that he should

gain forcible access to the Queen and secure the banishment from court

of her present advisers. In his dread of being once more placed under

arrest, and this time sent to the Tower, he determined, in February

1601, to carry out a plan he had been hatching, for taking the court by

storm.

Southampton had at this time allowed the malcontents to make his

residence, Drury House, their meeting-place for discussing the

situation. Here the general plan was laid that they should seize

upon Whitehall and that Essex should force his way into the Queen's

presence; the time was to depend upon the arrival of the Scotch envoy.

On the 5th of February, four or five of the Earl's friends presented

themselves at the Globe Theatre, and promised the players eleven

shillings more than they usually received if, on the 7th, they would

perform the play of the deposition and death of King Richard II.

(see above, p. 148). In the meantime, Essex had, in the beginning of

February, assembled his adherents in his own residence, Essex House,

and this induced the Government, which had heard with uneasiness of so

large a concourse of people, to summon Essex before the Council. He

received the summons on the 7th of February 1601, excused himself on

the ground of indisposition, and at once called his friends together.

On the same evening three hundred men were gathered at his house,

although no real plan had as yet been determined upon. He informed them

that his life was threatened by Cobham and Raleigh. On the morning

of the 8th of February, the Lord Keeper with three other noblemen,

commissioned by the Queen to inquire into what was going on, appeared

at Essex House, and demanded to see the Earl. They told him that any

complaints he might have to make to the Queen should receive attention,

but that in the first place he must order his adherents to disperse.

Essex made only confused replies: his life was threatened, he was to

be murdered in his bed, he had been treacherously dealt with, and so

forth. In the meantime shouts arose from the crowd of his retainers,

"Away, my lord; they abuse you, they betray you, they undo you; you

lose time!" Essex led the noblemen into his house amid cries from

his armed friends of "Kill them, kill them!" and "Shut them up! Keep

them as pledges, cast the great seal out at the window!" He had them

locked up in his library as prisoners or hostages. Then he came out

again, and, amid cries of "To Court! to Court!" his party rushed

through the gates. At the last moment, Essex learned that the Court

was prepared, the watch was doubled, and every access to Whitehall was

barred. They were therefore forced to attempt, in the first place, to

stir up an insurrection in the city. But in order to pass through the

streets horses were needed; they were sent for, but there was delay in

procuring them. So impatient was every one by this time, that instead

of awaiting their arrival, several hundred men, headed by Essex,

Southampton, Rutland, Blount, and other gentlemen, but without any

real leader or effective plan of action, set off for the city. Essex

nowhere made any speech to the populace, but merely shouted, as though

beside himself, that an attempt had been made to murder him. A good

many people, indeed, appeared to join him, but none of them were armed,

and they were in reality no more than onlookers. In the meantime,

the Government despatched high officials on horseback to different

quarters of the town to proclaim Essex a traitor; whereupon many of

his following deserted him. Troops, too, were despatched against him,

so that he, with the remainder of his band, with difficulty made their

way by water back to Essex House, which was immediately besieged and

fired upon. In the evening Essex and Southampton opened negotiations,

and about ten o'clock surrendered with their little force, on the

understanding that they should be courteously treated and accorded an

honourable trial. The prisoners were taken to the Tower.

Francis Bacon now again plays a part, and this time a decisive one,

in Essex's history. There was no need for him to take any share in

the trial; and even if his office had imposed it upon him, he ought

in common decency to have refrained. He was neither Attorney-General

nor Solicitor, but only one of the "Learned Counsel." The very fact of

his close friendship with Essex, however, made the Government anxious

that he should appear in the case. He was at once advocate and witness,

and was not summoned as one of the learned counsel, but expressly as

"friend to the accused."

On the 19th February, Essex and Southampton were brought before a court

consisting of twenty-five peers and nine judges. Already, on the 17th,

Thomas Leigh, a captain in Essex's Irish army, for trying to gain

access to the palace on the 8th February, had been beheaded in the

Tower. Now that Essex's cause was irreparably lost, Bacon had no other

thought than to make himself useful to the party in power and prove his

devotion to the Queen. The purport of his first speech against Essex

was to prove that the plan of exciting an insurrection in the city,

which was in reality an inspiration of the moment, had been the result

of three months' deliberation. He represented as false and hypocritical

Essex's assurance that he was driven to action by dread of the

machinations of powerful enemies. He compared Essex to Cain, the first

murderer, who also sought excuses for his deed, and to Pisistratus,

who wounded himself and ran through the streets of Athens, crying that

an attempt had been made upon his life. The Earl of Essex, he said, in

reality had no enemies.

Essex rejoined that he could "call forth Mr. Bacon against Mr. Bacon."

Bacon, "being a daily courtier," had promised to plead his cause with

the Queen. He had with great address composed a letter to her, to be

signed by Essex. He had also written another letter in his brother

Anthony's name, and an answer to it from Essex, both of which he was

to show to the Queen; and in these "he laid down the grounds of my

discontent, and the reasons I pretend against mine enemies, pleading as

orderly for me as I could do myself."

This rejoinder told sensibly against Bacon, and drove him in his reply

to launch against his benefactor a new and much more malignant and

dangerous comparison. He likened him to a renowned contemporary, also

a nobleman and a rebel, the Duke of Guise: "It was not the company you

carried with you, but the assistance you hoped for in the City which

you trusted unto. The Duke of Guise thrust himself into the streets of

Paris on the day of the Barricados in his doublet and hose, attended

only with eight gentlemen, and found that help in the city which

(thanks be to God) you failed of here. And what followed? The King was

forced to put himself into a pilgrim's weeds, and in that disguise to

steal away to scape their fury."

In view of Essex's persistent denial that he had aspired to the throne

or sought to do the Queen any injury, this parallel was a terrible one

for him.

Both he and Southampton were found guilty and condemned to death.

The trial of Shakespeare's protector, Southampton, and his signed

confession, have a special interest for us. In a private letter

from John Chamberlain, dated the 24th February, we read: "The Earl

of Southampton spake very well (but methought somewhat too much, as

well, as the other), and as a man that would fain live, pleaded hard

to acquit himself; but all in vain, for it could not be: whereupon he

descended to entreaty and moved great commiseration, and though he

were generally well liked, yet methought he was somewhat too low and

submiss, and seemed too loath to die before a proud enemy."

Southampton, in his own confession, admits that immediately after his

arrival in Ireland, he became aware of Essex's letter to King James of

Scotland, urging that, for his own sake, he ought not to permit the

government of England to remain in the hands of his and Essex's common

enemies, proposing that he should, at a fitting opportunity, assemble

an army, and promising that Essex, in so far as his duty to her Majesty

permitted, should support the King with his Irish troops. James replied

evasively, and nothing came of the plan, in which Southampton soon

regretted that he had taken share. After losing his post in Ireland,

he went to the Netherlands, and had no other desire than to regain

the favour of the Queen, when Essex, his kinsman and friend, summoned

him to London and requested his support in the plan he had formed for

seeking access to her Majesty. With a heavy heart, he had consented,

and engaged in the enterprise, not from any treachery or disrespect

towards her Majesty, but solely on account of his affection for

Essex. He repents and abhors his action, and promises on his knees to

consecrate to the Queen's service every day that remains to him, if she

will but spare his life.

Southampton impresses us as a man of fiery but yielding character,

entirely under the influence of a stronger personality; but he is never

betrayed into a single unworthy word with respect to his kinsman and

friend, whose cause he of course knew to be hopeless. His sentence was

commuted to imprisonment for life.

Essex himself, at the end, endured with less resolution the cruel

ordeal to which he was subjected. Finding himself condemned to death,

and knowing that many of his closest friends had confessed to the Drury

House discussions and designs, he lost all balance during the last

days of his life, entirely forgot his dignity, and overwhelmed those

around him, his sister, his friends, his secretary, and himself, with a

torrent of reproaches.

In the meantime his enemies were not idle. Even Raleigh, on whose proud

nature one is sorry, to find such a stain, impelled, of course, not

only by their old enmity, but by Essex's recent assertions that he was

plotting against his life, wrote to Cecil, in his uneasiness lest Essex

should be pardoned, and urged him "not to relent," but to see that the

sentence was carried out.

Elizabeth had first signed the death-warrant, and then recalled it. On

the 24th February she signed it a second time, and on the 25th February

1601, Essex's head was severed by three blows of the axe.

The populace could not be persuaded of their favourite's guilt. They

loathed his executioner, and detested those men who, like Bacon and

Raleigh, had, by their malice, contributed to his downfall.

In order to justify itself, the Government issued an official

_Declaration touching the Treasons of the late Earl of Essex and his

complices_, in the composition of which Bacon bore a large part. It

is very untrustworthy. James Spedding, indeed, one of Bacon's best

biographers, has tried to reconcile it with the facts; but he has

not succeeded in explaining away the damnatory circumstance that

everything is omitted which tended at the trial to establish Essex's

intention to use no violence, and to prove how entirely unpremeditated

was the attempt to raise an insurrection in the city. Where passages

of this nature occur in the records, all of which are preserved, we

find the letters _om_, (meaning, of course, "to be omitted") written

in the margin, sometimes in Bacon's hand, sometimes in that of the

Attorney-General, Coke.[1].

Bacon, with his brilliant intellectual equipment and his consciousness

of his great powers, is not to be set down as simply a bad man. But his

heart was cold, and he had no greatness of soul. He was absorbed, to

a quite unworthy degree, in the pursuit of worldly prosperity. Always

deeply in debt, he coveted above everything fine houses and gardens,

massive plate, great revenues, and, as essential preliminaries, high

offices and employments, titles and distinctions, which he might well

have left to men of meaner worth. He passed half his life in the

character of an office-seeker, met with one humiliating refusal after

another, and returned humble thanks for the gracious denial. Once

and once only, in his early days in Parliament, did he display some

independence and rectitude; but when he saw that it gave offence in the

highest places, he repented as bitterly as though he had been guilty

of a sin against all political morality, and besought her Majesty's

forgiveness in terms that might have befitted a detected thief. With

the like baseness and pusillanimity he now turned against Essex. He

had often cited the maxim, which even Cicero criticised in the _De

Amicitia_: "Love as if you should hereafter hate, and hate as if you

should hereafter love." He had never loved Essex otherwise. His excuse,

if there can be any, for seeking advancement at all costs, must be

found in the fact that he had the highest conception of his own value

to science, and thought that it would be to the honour and advantage of

learning that he, its high-priest, should be highly placed.

If we examine Essex's portrait, with its regular beauty, its air of

distinction and gentleness, the high forehead, the curly hair, and

the carefully combed long light beard, we can readily understand that

such a man, surrounded by a halo of adventurous renown, must become

the idol of the populace, and that the military incompetence which he

had twice displayed should not greatly affect the high esteem in which

the people held him. He was in reality as little of a statesman as of

a general; he was simply a free-speaking, passionate man, innocent of

diplomacy, a brave soldier without an idea of tactics. He misunderstood

his influence over Elizabeth, and did not realise that the Queen,

while she felt the charm of his personality, contemned his political

counsels. There was a good deal of the poet in his composition; he

wrote pretty sonnets, was a patron of writers no less than of fighters,

showed himself generous to profusion towards his friends and clients,

and found, perhaps, his sincerest and most convinced admirers among

the authors and poets of the day. Innumerable are the books which are

dedicated to him.

There is no doubt that after his melancholy death, a marked decline was

apparent in the Queen's courage and spirits. The legend, however, that

it was the fact of his execution which she took so much to heart, is

scarcely to be believed, and the story about Essex's ring, which was

conveyed to her too late, is unquestionably a fable. It is certain,

on the other hand--for the Duc de Biron, the envoy of Henri IV., had

no motive for telling a falsehood--that on the 12th September 1601,

after a conversation about Essex in which she jested over her departed

favourite, Elizabeth opened a box and took out of it Essex's skull,

which she showed to Biron. Ten months later, this favourite of the

French king--whose name Shakespeare had borrowed for the hero of his

first comedy--met with the very fate of Essex, and for a similar crime.

Bacon, no doubt, mourned Essex's disappearance even less than did the

Queen. After Elizabeth's death, however, when the friends of Essex

stood in the highest favour with the new King, he was shameless enough

to send a letter to Southampton (who, though not yet released from the

Tower, was already regarded as a power in the land), in which, after

having expressed his fear of being met with distrust, he concludes

thus: "It is as true as a thing that God knoweth, that this great

change hath wrought in me no other change towards your Lordship than

this, that I may safely be now that which I was truly before."

The circumstances of Essex's condemnation were of course not known in

the London of those days so minutely as we now know them. But we see,

as already indicated, that public opinion turned vehemently against

Bacon, regarding and despising him as the traitor to his lord who,

more than any one else, had brought about his unhappy end. We see

that Raleigh, in spite of his greatness, now became one of the most

unpopular men in England; and we observe that, notwithstanding all

that was done to disparage him in the general regard, Essex's memory

continued to be idolised by the great mass of the people.

If we now inquire in what relation Shakespeare stood to these events

which so absorbed the English people, it seems more than probable that

he, who had so recently been so intimately associated with Southampton,

and cannot therefore have been very far from Essex, followed the

accused with his sympathy, felt a lively resentment towards their

enemies, and took their fate much to heart. And when we observe that

just at this juncture a revolution occurs in Shakespeare's hitherto

cheerful habit of mind, and that he begins to take ever gloomier views

of human nature and of life, we cannot but recognise the probability

that grief for the fate which had overtaken Essex, Southampton, and

their fellows, was one of the sources of his growing melancholy.

[1] Compare _Dictionary of National Biography_, Robert Devereux;

Spedding, _Letters and Life of Francis Bacon_, ii. 190-374; Edwin

Abbott, _Francis Bacon, an Account of his Life and Works_, pp. 53-82;

Macaulay, _Lord Bacon_; Gosse, _Raleigh_.

V

_THE DEDICATION OF THE SONNETS_

We naturally looked for one source of his henceforth deepening

melancholy in outward events, in the political drama which reached its

crisis and catastrophe in 1601; but it is still more imperative that we

should look into his private and personal experiences for the ultimate

cause of the revolution in his soul. We must inquire what light his

works throw upon his private circumstances and state of mind at this

period.

Now, we find among Shakespeare's works one which, more than any other,

enables us to look into his inmost soul--I mean his Sonnets. It is

to these remarkable poems that we must mainly address ourselves for

the information we require. Public events may, indeed, cast a certain

measure of light or shadow over a man's inward world of thought and

feeling; but they are never the efficient factors in determining the

happiness or melancholy of his fundamental mood. If he has personal

reasons for feeling that fate is against him, the utmost serenity in

the political atmosphere will not dissipate his gloom; and, conversely,

if a deep joy abides within him, and he has personal reasons for

feeling himself favoured by fortune, then public discontent will be

powerless to disturb the harmony in his soul. But his depression will,

of course, be doubly severe if public events and private experiences

combine to cast a gloom over his mind.

Shakespeare's "sugred Sonnets" are first mentioned in the well-known

passage in Meres's _Palladis Tamia_ (1598), where they are spoken of as

passing from hand to hand "among his private friends." In the following

year the two important Sonnets now numbered cxxxviii. and cxliv. were

printed (with readings subsequently revised) in a collection of poems

named _The Passionate Pilgrim_, dishonestly published, and falsely

attributed to Shakespeare, by a bookseller named Jaggard. For the next

ten years we find no mention of Sonnets by Shakespeare, until, in

1609, a bookseller named Thomas Thorpe issued a quarto book entitled

_Shakespeares Sonnets. Neuer before Imprinted_--an edition which the

poet himself certainly cannot have revised for the press, but which may

possibly have been printed from an authentic manuscript.

To this first edition is prefixed a dedication, written by the

bookseller in the most contorted style, which has given rise to

theories and conjectures without number. It runs as follows:--

TO . THE . ONLIE . BEGETTER . OF

THESE . INSVING . SONNETS .

MR . W . H . ALL . HAPPINESSE .

AND . THAT . ETERNITIE .

PROMISED .

BY .

OVR . EVER-LIVING . POET .

WISHETH .

THE . WELL-WISHING .

ADVENTVRER . IN .

SETTING .

FORTH .

T . T .

The meaning of the signature is clear enough, since "A booke called

Shakespeare's Sonnets" was entered in the Stationers' Register on

May 20, 1609, under the name of Thomas Thorpe. On the other hand,

throughout this century and the last, there has been no end to the

discussion as to what is meant by "onlie begetter" (only producer,

or only procurer, or only inspirer?); and numberless have been the

attempts to identify the "Mr. W. H." who is so designated. While

the far-fetched expression "begetter" has been subjected to equally

far-fetched interpretations, the most impossible guesses have been

hazarded as to the initials W. H., and the most incredible conjectures

put forward as to the person to whom the Sonnets are addressed.

Strange as it may seem, it is nevertheless the fact, that during

the first eighty years of the eighteenth century the Sonnets were

taken as being all addressed to one woman, all written in honour of

Shakespeare's mistress. It was not till 1780 that Malone and his

friends declared that more than one hundred of the poems were addressed

to a man. This view of the matter, however, did not even then command

general assent, and so late as 1797 Chalmers seriously maintained

that all the Sonnets were addressed to Queen Elizabeth, who was also,

he believed, the inspirer of Spenser's famous _Amoretti_, in reality

addressed to the lady who afterwards became his wife. Not until the

beginning of this century did people in general understand, what

Shakespeare's contemporaries can certainly never have doubted, that the

first hundred and twenty-six Sonnets are directed to a young man.

It now followed almost of necessity that this young man should be

identified with the "Mr. W. H." who is described as the "onlie

begetter" of the poems. The second group, indeed, is addressed to a

woman; but the first group is much the larger, and follows immediately

upon the dedication.

Some have taken the word "begetter" to signify the man who procured the

manuscript for the bookseller, and have conjectured that the initials

are those of William Hathaway, a brother-in-law of Shakespeare's

(Neil, Elze). Dr. Farmer last century advanced the claims of William

Hart, the poet's nephew, who, as was afterwards discovered, was not

born until 1600. The mere fact that, by a whim or oversight of which

there are many other examples in the first edition, the word "hues,"

in Sonnet xx., is printed in italics with a capital and spelt _Hews_,

led Tyrwhitt to assume the existence of an otherwise unknown Mr.

William Hughes, to whom he supposed the Sonnets to have been addressed.

People have even been found to maintain that "Mr. W. H." referred to

Shakespeare himself, some taking the "H." to be a mere misprint for

"S.," others holding that the initials meant "Mr. William Himself"

(Barnstorff).

Serious and competent critics for a long time inclined to the opinion

that the "W. H." was a transposition of "H. W.," and represented none

other than Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, whose close relation

to the poet had long been known, and to whom his two narrative poems

had been dedicated. This theory was held by Drake and Gervinus. But so

early as 1832, Boaden advanced some objections to this view. He urged

that Southampton never possessed the personal beauty incessantly dwelt

upon in these poems. Finally, the Sonnets fit neither his age, nor his

character, nor his history, full of movement, activity, and adverse

fortune, to which no smallest allusion appears.

There is not the slightest doubt that these poems are addressed to a

patron of rank; but our knowledge of the history of Shakespeare is so

inconsiderable, that with regard to his patrons at the court, we have

nothing to judge from but the dedications of Venus and of Lucrece to

Southampton, and the dedication of the First Folio to Lords Pembroke

and Montgomery, in which reference is made to the favour they had

always shown these plays and their author, while he was alive. Bright

and Boaden had already, in 1819 and 1832 respectively, advanced the

opinion that Pembroke was the hero of the Sonnets. This view was shared

by almost every one (Charles Armitage, Brown Hallan, Massey, Henry

Brown, Minto, W. M. Rossetti), and towards the end of the nineteenth

century this opinion could be considered as having established itself,

since it was concurred in by the chief Shakespeare students (Dowden),

and seemed to have obtained its final confirmation in the penetrating

criticisms of Thomas Tyler (1890). All the above-mentioned authors

agree about the fact, that there is only one person whose age, history,

appearance, virtues, and vices accord in every respect with those of

the young man to whom the Sonnets are addressed, just as his initials

agree with those of the "Mr. W. H." to whom they are dedicated,

and that is the young William Herbert, who in 1601 became Earl of

Pembroke. Born on April 8, 1580, he came to London in the autumn of

1597 or spring of 1598, and very soon, in all probability, made the

acquaintance of Shakespeare, whose patron, as the first folio edition

of the dramas prove, he remained until the poet's death.

The way by which we arrive at William Herbert is this: The Sonnets

cxxxv. and cxxxvi. as well as cxliii. contain plays on the word _will_,

and the name _Will_, obscure as they are, they show that the friend

whom the Sonnets glorify had the same Christian name as Shakespeare.

This was true of Pembroke, but not of Southampton, whose Christian name

was Henry. Shakespeare's Sonnets are not isolated poems. Though we are

not certain whether the order of the Sonnets in the original edition

is the sequence chosen by the poet himself, still it is evident that

they stand in an intimate relation to each other, a thought or motive

suggested in one being developed more at length in the next or one of

the subsequent Sonnets. The grouping does not seem to be arbitrary;

at any rate, it is so far careful that all attempts to alter it have

only rendered the poems more obscure. The first seventeen Sonnets, for

example, form a closely interwoven group; in all of them, the friend

is exhorted not to die unmarried, but to leave the world an heir to

his beauty, which must otherwise fade and perish with him. Sonnets

c.-cxxvi., which are inseparably connected, turn on the reunion of two

friends after a coldness or misunderstanding has for a time severed

them. Finally, Sonnets cxxvii.-clii. are all addressed, not to a

friend, but to a mistress, the Dark Lady whose relation to the two

friends has already formed the subject of earlier Sonnets.

Sonnet cxliv.--one of the most interesting, inasmuch it depicts

in straightforward terms the poet's situation between friend and

mistress--had already appeared, as above mentioned, in _The Passionate

Pilgrim_ (1599). It characterises the friend as the poet's "better

angel," the mistress as his "worser spirit," and expresses the painful

suspicion that the friend is entangled in the Dark Lady's toils--

"I guess one angel in another's hell;"

so that both at once are lost to him, he through her and she through

him.

But precisely the same theme is treated in Sonnet xl., which turns on

the fact that the friend has robbed Shakespeare of his "love." These

two Sonnets must thus be of the same date; and from Sonnet xxxiii.,

which relates to the same circumstances, we see that the friendship had

existed only a very short time when it was overshadowed by the intrigue

between the friend and the mistress:--

"But out, alack! he was but one hour mine."

At what time, then, did the friendship begin? The date may be

determined with some confidence, even apart from the question as to

who the friend was. We know that Shakespeare must have written sonnets

before 1598, since Meres published in that year his often-quoted words

about the "sugred Sonnets"; but we cannot possibly determine which

Sonnets these were, or whether we possess them at all, since those

which passed from hand to hand "among his private friends" may very

possibly have disappeared. If they are included in our collection, we

may take them to be those in which we find frequent parallels to lines

in _Venus and Adonis_ and the early plays, though these coincidences

are by no means sufficient, as some of the German critics[1] would

have us believe, finally to establish the date of the Sonnets in which

they occur. However, they vary greatly in quality, and may have been

written at different periods. The first group, with its reiterated

appeal (seventeen times repeated) to the friend, to leave the world a

living copy of his beauty, is unquestionably the least valuable. The

personal feelings of the poet do not come much into play here, and

though these poems may have been addressed to William Herbert in 1598,

it is not impossible, taking into account the many analogies in thought

and mode of expression to be found in them and in _Venus and Adonis_

and _Romeo and Juliet_, that they were produced several years before,

and in this case, addressed to Southampton. Thomas Tyler believed he

had satisfactorily established the date of one important group by

showing that a passage in Meres's book had influenced the conception

and expression of one of Shakespeare's Sonnets. It cannot reasonably be

doubted that Shakespeare saw _Palladis Tamia_; the author perhaps sent

him a copy; and in any case he could not but have read with interest

the warm and sincere commendation there bestowed upon himself. Now

there occurs in Meres's book a passage in which, after quoting Ovid's

"Jamque opus exegi, quod nec Jovis ira, nec ignis,

Nec poterit ferrum, nec edax abolere vetustas,"

and Horace's

"Exegi momentum aere perennius,"

the critic goes on to apply these words to his contemporaries Sir

Philip Sidney, Spenser, Daniel, Drayton, Shakespeare, and Warner,

and then winds up with a Latin eulogy of the same writers, composed

by himself, partly in prose and partly in verse. But on reading

attentively Shakespeare's Sonnet lv., whose resemblance to the

well-known lines of Horace must have struck every reader, we find

several expressions from this passage in _Palladis Tamia_, and even

from the lines written by Meres himself, reappearing in it. The Sonnet

must thus have been written at earliest in the end of 1598--Meres's

book was entered in the Stationers' Register in September--and

possibly not till the beginning of 1599. Since, then, the following

Sonnet (lvi.), which must date from about the same time, speaks of the

friendship as newly formed--

"Let this sad interim like the ocean be

Which parts the shores, where _two contracted new_

Come daily to the banks"--

we may confidently assign to the year 1598 the first contract of amity

between the poet and his friend. However, all this is by no means

conclusive. Shakespeare may have known Horace from other sources than

Meres, and the quotation from Ovid, together with the expressions used

by Meres, he certainly had encountered in Golding's translation of the

_Metamorphoses_, with which he was familiar.

The historical allusions in Sonnets c.-cxxvi., which form a continuous

poem, are not, indeed, by any means clear or easy to interpret; but

Sonnet civ. dates the whole group definitely enough, in the statement

that three years have elapsed since the first meeting of the friends:--

"Three winters cold

Have from the forests shook three summers' pride;

Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turn'd

In process of the seasons have I seen;

Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burn'd,

Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green."

Thus we must assign this important group to the year 1601; and this

being so, it must also appear probable that the line--

"The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured "--

alludes to the fact that Elizabeth (for whom, in the mode of the day,

the moon was the accepted symbol) had come unharmed through the dangers

of Essex's rebellion--the more so as the beautiful lines--

"Now with the drops of this most balmy time

My love looks fresh "--

show that the poem was written in the spring. It would be unreasonable

to infer from this allusion any ill-will on the poet's part towards

Essex and his comrades. Still less can we follow Tyler, when, by

the aid of a complex scaffolding of hypotheses built up, in German

rather than in English fashion, around Sonnets cxxiv. and cxxv., he

laboriously works up to the air-drawn conjecture that Shakespeare

is here expressing himself offensively towards his former patron

Southampton, now a prisoner in the Tower, and even that Southampton is

aimed at in the line about those "who have lived for crime." Equally

baseless, of course, is the corollary which would find in Sonnet cxxv.

Shakespeare's defence against an accusation of faithlessness towards

the man to whom he had written, seven years earlier, in the dedication

of _Lucrece_, "The love I dedicate Your Lordship is without end." Nor

It is absurd to construct a whole repulsive and fantastic romance on

the basis of a single obscure phrase.

Turning now from the poems to the person to whom they are believed to

have been addressed, this is what we learn of him:--

William Herbert, son of Henry Herbert and his third wife, the

celebrated Mary Sidney, had for his tutor as a boy the poet Samuel

Daniel; entered at Oxford in 1593, where he remained for two years;

received permission in April 1597, when he was seventeen years old, to

live in London, but, as we gather from letters of the period, does not

seem to have come up to town until the spring of 1598.

In August 1597, negotiations were conducted by letter between his

parents and Lord Burghley with a view to his marriage with Burghley's

grand-daughter Bridget Vere, a daughter of the Earl of Oxford. It

is true that she was only thirteen, but William Herbert was quite

prepared to enter upon the engagement. He was to travel abroad before

the marriage. Although his mother, the Countess of Pembroke, perhaps

divining her son's too in flammable nature, and therefore wanting

to see him married betimes, was much in favour of this project, and

although the Earl of Oxford was pleased with the young man and praised

his "many good partes," difficulties arose of which we have no record,

and the plan came to nothing.

In London, young Herbert lived at Baynard's Castle, close to the

Blackfriars Theatre, and may thus have been brought in contact with the

players. It is more probable, however, that so brilliant a woman as

"Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother," should have aroused his interest

in Shakespeare; and in that case the poet, in all probability, made the

acquaintance of this distinguished and discerning patroness of art and

artists as early as 1598. Herbert's father, who died soon afterwards,

was already an invalid.

It appears that in August 1599 Herbert "followed the camp" at the

annual musters, attending her Majesty with two hundred horse, and

"swaggering it among the men of war."

He is from the first described as a bad courtier. Rowland Whyte writes

of him at this time: "He was much blamed for his cold and weeke Maner

of pursuing her Majesties favour, having had soe good steps to lead

him unto it. There is want of Spirit and Courage laid to his charge,

and that he is a melancholy young man." We may gather from this what

fiery devotion every handsome and well-born young man was expected

to pay to the elderly Queen. Soon after, however, it appears from

a letter from his father to Elizabeth that she must have expressed

herself highly satisfied with the young man, and we also learn that he

was "exceedingly beloued at Court of all Men." He appears to have been

very handsome, and to have possessed all the fascination which so often

belongs to an amiable _mauvais sujet_. Clarendon says of him, in the

first book of his _History of the Rebellion_, that "he was immoderately

given up to women," and that "he indulged himself in pleasures of all

kind, almost in all excesses." Clarendon remarks, however, what is of

particular interest for us, that the young Pembroke possessed a good

deal of self-control: "He retained such a power and jurisdiction over

his very appetite, that he was not so much transported with beauty and

outward allurements as with those advantages of the mind as manifested

an extraordinary wit, and spirit, and knowledge, and administered great

pleasure in the conversation. To these he sacrificed himself, his

precious time, and much of his fortune."

In November 1599, Herbert had an hour's private audience with

Elizabeth. Whyte, who relates this, remarks that he now stands high in

the Queen's favour, "but he greatly wants advise." He passed the rest

of the winter in the country, suffering from an illness which seems to

have taken the form of ague, with incessant headaches.

Tyler is inclined, not without reason, to assign Sonnets xc.-xcvi.

to this period. Shakespeare's complaints of his friend's "desertion"

may refer to his life at Court; the expressions in Sonnet xci. as to

horses, hawks, and hounds, perhaps point to the young man's absorption

in sport. The following Sonnets dwell unequivocally upon discreditable

rumours as to the friend's life and conduct. Here appears the

above-quoted (p. 172) line:--

"Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds."

Here occurs the couplet:--

"How like Eve's apple doth thy beauty grow,

If thy sweet virtue answer not thy show!"

And, in spite of all the loving forbearance which the poet manifests

towards his friend, he seems to imply that the ugly rumours were not

unfounded:--

"How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame,

Which, like a canker in the fragrant rose,

Doth spot the beauty of thy budding name!

O, in what sweets dost thou thy sins enclose!

That tongue that tells the story of thy days,

(Making lascivious comments on thy sport,)

Cannot dispraise but in a kind of praise;

Naming thy name blesses an ill report.

There was an improvement in the health of Herbert's father during

the year 1600, yet Lord and Lady Pembroke were absent from London

all summer, remaining at their country seat, Wilton. In the month of

May, Herbert, accompanied by Sir Charles Danvers, went to Gravesend

to pay his respects to Lady Rich and Lady Southampton. This visit

proves clearly that there was not, as Tyler's above-mentioned

interpretation of certain Sonnets would lead us to assume, any

coolness between Herbert and the houses of Essex and Southampton.

It is also worth noting that his companion on this excursion was so

intimately associated with the chiefs of the malcontent party, that in

the following year he had to pay with his life for his share in the

rebellion.

In the accounts of a splendid and very much talked-of wedding, between

a Lord Herbert and one of the Queen's ladies, which took place at

Blackfriars in June 1600, we for the first time come upon William

Herbert's name in company with that of the lady who seems to be the

heroine of Shakespeare's Sonnets. The bride, Mrs. Ann Russell, was

conducted to church by William Herbert and Lord Cobham. After supper

there was a masque, in which eight splendidly dressed ladies executed a

new and unusual dance. Among these are mentioned Mrs. Fitton, and two

of the ladies-in-waiting whose names had shortly before been coupled

with that of Essex (Mrs. Southwell and Mrs. Bess Russell). Each had "a

skirt of Cloth of Siluer, a Mantell of Carnacion Taffete cast vnder the

Arme, and their Haire loose about their Shoulders, curiously knotted

and interlaced." The leader of this double quadrille was Mrs. Fitton.

She approached the Queen and "woed her to dawnce; her Majestie asked

what she was; '_Affection_,' she said. '_Affection!_' said the Queen,

'_affection_ is false.' Yet her Majestie rose and dawnced."

Later in the year Whyte remarks in his letters that Herbert shows no

"disposition to marry"; and we find him in September and October 1600

vigorously training at Greenwich for a Court tournament.

On January 19, 1601, his father's death made William Herbert Earl

of Pembroke. Very soon afterwards (the matter is mentioned in a

letter from Robert Cecil so early as February 5) he got into deep

disgrace over a love affair--evidently that which forms the subject

of Shakespeare's Sonnets. He had for some time carried on a secret

intrigue with the aforesaid Mary Fitton, a maid-of-honour who stood

high in the Queen's good graces; and the secret now came to light.

"Mistress Fitton," writes Cecil, "is proved with child, and the Earl

of Pembroke, being examined, confesseth a fact, but utterly renounceth

all marriage. I fear they will both dwell in the Tower awhile, for the

Queen hath vowed to send them thither." In another contemporary letter

it is stated that "in that tyme when that Mres Fytton was in great

fauor ... and duringe the time yt the Earle of Pembrooke fauord her,

she would put off her head tire and tucke vp her clothes and take a

large white cloake, and march as though she had bene a man to meete the

said Earle out of the Courte."

Mary Fitton gave birth to a still-born son; Pembroke lay for a month in

the Fleet Prison, and was banished from Court. He shortly afterwards

applied through Cecil for leave to travel abroad. The Queen's

displeasure, he says, is "a hell" to him; he hopes the Queen will not

carry her resentment so far as to bind him to the country which has

now become "hateful to him of all others." The permission to travel

seems to have been given and then revoked. In the middle of June he

writes that imploring letter to Cecil in which the reference to "her

whose Incomparable beauty was the onely sonne of my little world," was

designed to touch Elizabeth's hard heart; for Pembroke, it is plain,

had now realised that what had offended her Majesty was not so much his

intrigue with Mary Fitton as the fact of his having overlooked her own

much higher perfections. But the compliments came too late. Elizabeth,

as we have already seen in the case of Essex, knew how to make the

objects of her resentment suffer in that most sensitive point--the

pocket. The "patent of the Forest of Dean," which had been held by the

late Lord Pembroke, expired with him, and the son expected, according

to use and wont, to have it renewed in his favour; but it was assigned

to Pembroke's rival, Sir Edward Winter, and not until seven years

later, under James, did Pembroke recover it.

Pembroke continued in disgrace, his renewed applications for permission

to travel were persistently refused, and he was ordered to regard

himself as banished from Court, and to "keep house in the country." It

is this overshadowing of Pembroke's fortunes in 1601 which explains the

temporary breaking-off of his relations with Shakespeare in London,

indicated by the "Envoy" with which Sonnet cxxvi. ends the series

addressed to the Friend.

The close and affectionate relation between them was no doubt revived

under James. This appears clearly enough from the Dedication of the

First Folio. Let us now cast a rapid glance over the remainder of

Pembroke's career.

His father's death placed him in possession of a large fortune,

but the irregularity of his life left him seldom free from money

embarrassments. In 1604 he married Lady Mary, the seventh daughter of

Lord Talbot, and the marriage was celebrated with a tournament. His

wife brought him a large property, but it was thought at the time that

he paid very dear for it in having to take her into the bargain. The

marriage was far from happy.

Pembroke shared the love of literature which had distinguished his

mother and his uncle, Sir Philip Sidney. According to Aubrey, he

was "the greatest Mæcenas to learned men of any peer of his time or

since." Among his "learned" friends were the poets Donne, and Daniel,

and Massinger, who was the son of his father's steward. Ben Jonson

composed a eulogistic epigram in his honour, as well he might, for

every New Year Pembroke sent Ben £20 to buy books with. Inigo Jones is

said to have visited Italy at his expense, and was frequently employed

by him. Davison's _Poetical Rhapsody_ and numerous other books are

dedicated to him. Chapman, who was among his intimates, inscribed a

sonnet to him at the close of his translation of the _Iliad_. This fact

is of particular interest to us, because Chapman (as Professor Minto

succeeded in establishing) is clearly the rival poet who paid court to

Pembroke, won his goodwill and admiration, and thereby aroused jealousy

and melancholy self-criticism in Shakespeare's breast, as we read in

Sonnets lxxviii.-lxxxvi.[2].

It is especially on Sonnet lxxxvi. that Minto bases his identification

of the rival poet with Chapman. The very opening line, referring

to the "proud full sail of his great verse," suggests at once the

fourteen-syllable measure in which Chapman translated the _Iliad_.

Chapman was full of a passionate enthusiasm for the art of poetry,

which he lost no opportunity of glorifying; and he laid claim to

supernatural inspiration. In the Dedication to his poem _The Shadow of

the Night_ (1594), he speaks with severe contempt of the presumption of

those who "think Skill so mightily pierced with their loves that she

should prostitutely show them her secrets, when she will scarcely be

looked upon by others but with invocation, fasting, watching--yea, not

without having drops of their souls, _like a heavenly familiar. _Hence

Shakespeare's lines--

"Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to writ

Above a mortal pitch that struck me dead?"

and the expression--

"He, nor that affable familiar ghost

Which nightly gulls him with intelligence."

After the accession of James, Pembroke immediately took a high position

at the new Court. Before the year 1603 was out, he was a Knight of

the Garter, and had entertained the King at Wilton. He rose from one

high post to another, until in 1615 he became Lord Chamberlain; but

he continued to the last the dissipated life of his youth. He devoted

large sums of money to the exploration and colonisation of America.

Places were named after him in the Bermudas and Virginia. In 1614,

morever, he became a member of the East India Company.

He opposed the Spanish Alliance, and was no friend to the King's

foreign policy. He is thought to have instigated in some measure the

attack on the Mexico fleet for which Raleigh paid so dear. He was an

opponent of Bacon as Lord Chancellor, and in 1621 advocated an inquiry

into the charges of corruption which were brought against him; but

afterwards, like Southampton, displayed great moderation, and spoke

strongly against the proposal to deprive Bacon of his peerage.

He stood by the King's deathbed in March 1625, had a serious illness in

1626, and died in April 1630 "of an apoplexy after a full and cheerful

supper." Donne in 1660 published some poems.

[1] Hermann Conrad in _Preussische Jahrbücher_, February 1895.

Under the pseudonym of Hermann Isaac in _Jahrbuch der Deutschen

Shakespeare-Gesellschaft_, vol. xix. p. 176.

[2] I do not find that Mr. G. A. Leigh has succeeded in identifying the

rival poet with Tasso (_Westminster Review_, February 1897).

VI

_THE "DARK LADY" OF THE SONNETS--MARY FITTON_

In speaking of _Love's Labours Lost_, I remarked that it was not

difficult to distinguish the original text of the comedy from the

portions added and altered during the revision of 1598; and I cited

(p. 38) several instances in which the distinction was clear. Especial

emphasis was laid on the fact that Biron's (or, as the context shows,

Biron-Shakespeare's) rapturous panegyrics of love in the fourth act

belong to the later date.

At another place (p. 83) it was pointed out that the two Rosalines of

_Love's Labour's Lost_ (end of the third act) and of _Romeo and Juliet_

(ii. 4) were in all probability drawn from the same model, since she is

in both places described as a blonde with black eyes. In the original

text of _Love's Labour's Lost_ (Act iii.) she is expressly called--

"A whitely wanton with a velvet brow,

With two pitch balls stuck in her face for eyes."

All the more surprising must it seem that during the revision the poet

quite obviously had before his eyes another model, repeatedly described

as "black," whose dark complexion indeed, so uncommon and un-English

that it was apt to be thought ugly, is insisted upon as strongly as

that of the "Dark Lady" in the Sonnets. Immediately before Biron bursts

forth into his great hymn to Eros, in which Shakespeare so clearly

makes him his mouthpiece, the King banters him as to the murky hue of

the object of his adoration:--

"_King_. By heaven, thy love is black as ebony.

_Biron_. Is ebony like her? O wood divine!

A wife of such wood were felicity.

O! who can give an oath? where is a book?

That I may swear beauty doth beauty lack,

If that she learn not of her eye to look:

No face is fair, that is not full so black.

_King_. O paradox! Black is the badge of hell,

The hue of dungeons, and the scowl of night;

And beauty's crest becomes the heavens well."

Biron's answer to this is highly remarkable; for it is exactly what

Shakespeare himself says, in Sonnet cxxvii., to the advantage of his

dark beauty:--

"_Biron_. Devils soonest tempt, resembling spirits of light.

O! if in black my lady's brows be deck'd,

It mourns, that painting, and usurping hair,

Should ravish doters with a false aspect;

And therefore is she born to make black fair.

Her favour turns the fashion of the days;

For native blood is counted painting now,

And therefore red, that would avoid dispraise,

Paints itself black, to imitate her brow."

The Sonnet runs thus:--

"In the old age black was not counted fair,

Or if it were, it bore not beauty's name;

But now is black beauty's successive heir,

And beauty slander'd with a bastard shame;

For since each hand hath put on nature's power,

Fairing the foul with art's false borrow'd face,

Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bower,

But is profan'd, if not lives in disgrace.

Therefore my mistress' eyes are raven black,

Her eyes so suited, and they mourners seem

At such, who, not born fair, no beauty lack,

Slandering creation with a false esteem:

Yet so they mourn, becoming of their woe,

That every tongue says, beauty should look so."

It appears, then, that the dark beauty in _Love's Labour's Lost_ must

also have had a living model; and when we observe that the revision, as

the title-page tells us, took place when the comedy was to be presented

before her Highness at Christmas 1597, and further, that the dark

Rosaline in the play is maid-of-honour to a princess who is called,

in words strongly suggesting a passing compliment to the Queen, "a

gracious moon"--we can scarcely avoid the conclusion that the beautiful

brunette must have been one of the Queen's ladies, and that the whole

end of the fourth act was addressed to her over the heads of the

uninitiated spectators. Who she was, moreover, we can now conjecture

with tolerable security. We know quite well which of the Queen's

ladies brought Pembroke into disgrace, and we are no less certain that

the lady who enthralled Pembroke was the black-eyed brunette whom

Shakespeare, in his own words, loved to "distraction" and to "madding

fever."

On the monument of Mary Fitton's mother in Gawsworth Church, in

Cheshire, a highly coloured bust of Mary Fitton herself[1] led Tyler to

assert that she must have been a marked brunette. It is true that the

bust cannot give us a very accurate idea of her appearance in the year

1600, since it was executed in 1626, when she was forty-eight; but the

complexion is dark, the high-piled hair and the large eyes black. That

it does not suggest a beautiful original is a point in favour of its

identity with the Dark Lady as described in Sonnet cxli.:--

"In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes,

For they in thee a thousand errors note;

But 'tis my heart that loves what they despise,

Who in despite of view is pleas'd to dote.

Nor are mine ears with thy tongue's tune delighted;

Nor tender feeling to base touches prone,

Nor taste, nor smell, desire to be invited

To any sensual feast with thee alone:

But my five wits nor my five senses can

Dissuade one foolish heart from serving thee,

Who leaves unsway'd the likeness of a man,

Thy proud heart's slave and vassal wretch to be:

Only my plague thus far I count my gain,

That she that makes me sin awards me pain."

The Rev. W. A. Harrison has discovered a family tree from which it

appears that Mary Fitton, born June 24, 1578, became a maid-of-honour

to Elizabeth in 1595, at the age of seventeen. Thus she was nineteen

years old when, at the Court festivities of 1597, Shakespeare's company

acted _Love's Labour's Lost_, with the panegyric of the dark beauty,

Rosaline. She must have made the acquaintance of the poet and player,

then thirty-three years old, at earlier Court entertainments. Who can

doubt that it was she, with her high position and daring spirit, who

made the first advances?

That the Dark Lady did not live with Shakespeare appears clearly

enough in the Sonnets--for instance, in Sonnet cxliv. ("but being both

from me"). It may be gathered from Sonnet cli., with the expressions

"triumphant prize," "proud of this pride," that she was greatly his

superior in rank and station, so that her conquest for some time filled

him with a sense of triumph. Tyler even believes that there is an

actual allusion to her name in Sonnet cli., which, as a whole, abounds

in such daring equivoques as would be impossible in modern poetry.

It was thought surprising that in Sonnet clii., in which Shakespeare

calls himself forsworn because he loves his lady although married to

another, he also states expressly that she too is married, calling her

"twice forsworn," since she has not only broken her "bed-vow," but

broken her "new faith" to Shakespeare himself. It seemed difficult to

reconcile this with the fact that Mrs. Fitton ("Mistress" in those days

being applicable to unmarried no less than to married women) was always

called by her father's name. She was married in 1607 to a certain

William Polwheele, with whom she appears to have had a love-intrigue

before the wedding. After the death of her husband she was married a

second time to John Lougher.

However, it must now be pointed out that a work, published in 1897,

which for the first time gave a trustworthy account of Mary Fitton's

life, has rendered it excessively improbable that she should be

identical with the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. The title of the work is:

_Gossip from a Muniment-Room, being Passages in the lives of Anne and

Mary Fitton_, 1574-1618; it is published by Lady Newdigate-Newdegate,

who is married to a descendant of the elder sister, Anne Fitton,

and it contains many interesting letters to this lady, with other

communications from the family-archives. Here it is proved--in spite of

Tyler's attempted contradiction--that the two well-preserved portraits

of Mary Fitton at Arbury show that she was not dark at all, but had a

light complexion, brown hair, and grey eyes.

From Mary Fitton herself there is only a brief note contained in the

collection, but her name is often mentioned in the letters. They prove,

that at the beginning of her career as maid-of-honour to the Queen, she

had an admirer in the elderly court-functionary, Sir William Knollys,

inspector of the household, who later, under King James, became a very

potent personality as Lord Knollys; and it was evidently arranged

between them that they would marry as soon as Sir William should become

a widower. Their relations were not severed until the Pembroke scandal

came out. Sir William married another lady after the death of his

wife. This relation appeared to support the belief that Mary Fitton

was Shakespeare's lady, as far as it gave a clue to the expression

_thy bed vow broke_, and in so far as Knollys' Christian name William

seemed to explain the two first lines in Sonnet cxxxv.: You have your

will (or William) and William (or will) a second time and William (or

will) into the bargain. It had long been admitted that the two last

of these _Wills_ referred to Pembroke and Shakespeare. And it was

suggested that a third Will was hidden in the first. In 1881 Dowden

wrote: "As we know that the lady had a husband, it may be possible

that he too bore the name of William." As against the unmistakable

evidence of the portraits, however, it is impossible to attribute any

weight to this circumstance. Moreover, the name of Shakespeare is never

mentioned in the recently-published papers of the Fitton family. Of

course the silence in itself is not conclusive. Mary Fitton may have

known Shakespeare intimately without her relatives being aware of the

fact. Besides, we know, from the dedication, which the clown of the

Shakespearian troupe, the well known William Kemp, in 1600, addressed

to her in his little book "Nine Daies Wonder," that she had certain

relations with the company. This dedication runs as follows: _Mistress

Anne (supposed to be Mary) Fitton, Mayde of Honour of the most sacred

Mayde Royal Queene Elisabeth._ But I confess, that Mary's grey eyes

decide the matter for me.

However, even if it be unreasonable to identify Mary Fitton with the

Dark Lady of the Sonnets, after the publication of the Fitton family

papers, this does not exclude the possibility that Pembroke may have

been Shakespeare's rival. If Essex, as above mentioned, was obliged to

acknowledge that he had had intrigues with four of the ladies of the

court at the same time, Pembroke may well have had intimate relations

with two of them at Once.

The Dark Lady must have been a woman in the extremest sense of the

word, a daughter of Eve, alluring, ensnaring, greedy of conquest,

mendacious and faithless, born to deal out rapture and torment with

both hands, the very woman to set in vibration every chord in a poet's

soul.

There can be no reasonable doubt that in the early days of his

relation with the well-born mistress, Shakespeare felt himself a

favourite of fortune, intoxicated with love and happiness, exalted

above his station, honoured and enriched. She must at first have been

to him what Maria Fiammetta, the natural daughter of a king, was to

Boccaccio. She must have brought a breath from a higher world, an

aroma of aristocratic womanhood, into his life. He must have admired

her wit, her presence of mind and her daring, her capricious fancy and

her quickness of retort. He must have studied, enjoyed, and adored in

her--and that in the closest intimacy--the well-bred ease, the sportive

coquetry, the security, elegance, and gaiety of the emancipated lady.

Who can tell how much of her personality has been transferred to his

brilliant young Beatrices and Rosalinds?

First and foremost he must have owed to her the rapture of feeling

his vitality intensified--a main element in the happiness which, in

the first years of their communion, finds expression in the sparkling

love-comedies we have just reviewed. Let it not be objected that the

Sonnets do not dwell upon this happiness. The Sonnets date from the

period of storm and stress, when he had ascertained what at first, no

doubt, he had but vaguely suspected, that his mistress had ensnared

his friend; and in composing them he no doubt antedated many of the

passionate and distracted unoods which overwhelmed him at the crisis,

when he not only realised the fact of their intrigue, but saw it

dragged to the light of day. He then felt as though, doubly betrayed,

he had irrevocably lost them both. Thus the picture of his mistress

drawn in the Sonnets shows her, not as she appeared to him in earlier

years, but as he saw her during this later period.

Yet he also depicts moments, and even hours, when his whole nature must

have been lapped in tenderness and harmony. The scene, for instance, so

melodiously portrayed in Sonnet cxxviii. is steeped in an atmosphere

of happy love--the scene in which, seated at the virginals, the lady,

whom the poet addresses as "my music," lets her delicate aristocratic

fingers wander over the keys, enchanting with their concord the

listener who longs to press her fingers and her lips to his. He envies

the keys that "kiss the tender inward of her hand," and concludes:--

"Since saucy jacks so happy are in this,

Give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss."

It is only natural, however, that the morbidly passionate, complaining,

and accusing Sonnets should be in the majority.

Again and again he reverts to her faithlessness and laxity of conduct.

In Sonnet cxxxvii. he speaks of his love as "anchored in the bay where

all men ride." Sonnet cxxxviii. begins:--

"When my love swears that she is made of truth,

I do believe her, though I know she lies."

And in Sonnet clii. he reproaches himself with having sworn a host of

false oaths in swearing to her good qualities:--

"But why of two oaths' breach do I accuse thee,

When I break twenty? I am perjur'd most;

For all my vows are oaths but to misuse thee,

And all my honest faith in thee is lost:

For I have sworn deep oaths of thy deep kindness,

Oaths of thy love, thy truth, thy constancy;

And, to enlighten thee, gave eyes to blindness,

Or made them swear against the thing they see."

In Sonnet cxxxix. he depicts her as carrying her thirst for admiration

to such a pitch of wantonness that even in his presence she could not

refrain from coquetting on every hand:--

"Tell me thou lov'st elsewhere; but in my sight,

Dear heart, forbear to glance thine eye aside:

What need'st thou wound with cunning, when thy might

Is more than my o'erpress'd defence can 'bide?"

She cruelly abuses her witchery over him. She is as tyrannical, he says

in Sonnet cxxxi., "as those whose beauties proudly make them cruel,"

well-knowing that to his "dear-doting heart" she is "the finest and

most precious jewel." There is actual magic in the power she exerts

over him. He does not understand it himself, and exclaims in Sonnet

cl.:--

"Whence hast thou this becoming of things ill,

That in the very refuse of thy deeds

There is such strength and warrantise of skill,

That in my mind thy worst all best exceeds?"

No French poet of the eighteen-thirties, not even Musset himself self,

has given more passionate utterance than Shakespeare to the fever and

agony and distraction of love. See, for instance, Sonnet cxlvii.:--

"My love is as a fever, longing still

For that which longer nurseth the disease:

Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,

The uncertain-sickly appetite to please.

My reason, the physician to my love,

Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,

Hath left me, and I desperate now approve

Desire is death, which physic did except.

Past cure I am, now reason is past care,

And frantic-mad with evermore unrest:

My thoughts and my discourse as madmen's are,

At random from the truth vainly express'd;

For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,

Who art as black as hell, as dark as night."

He depicts himself as a lover frenzied with passion. His eyes are

dimmed with vigils and with tears. He no longer understands either

himself or the world: "If that is fair whereon his false eyes dote,

What means the world to say it is not so?" If it is not fair, then his

love proves that a lover's eye is less trustworthy than that of the

indifferent world (Sonnet cxlviii.).

And yet he well knows the seat of the witchery by which she holds him

in thrall. It lies in the glow and expression of her exquisite "raven

black" eyes (Sonnets cxxvii. and cxxxix.). He loves her soulful eyes,

which, knowing the torments her disdain inflicts upon him--

"Have put on black, and loving mourners be,

Looking with pretty ruth upon my pain."

--Sonnet cxxxii.

Young as she is, her nature is all compounded of passion and will;

she is ungovernable in her caprices, born for conquest and for

self-surrender.

While we can guess that towards Shakespeare she made the first

advances, we know that she did so in the case of his friend. In more

than one sonnet she is expressly spoken of as "wooing him."[2] In

Sonnet cxliii. Shakespeare uses an image which, in all its homeliness,

is exceedingly graphic:--

"Lo! as a careful housewife runs to catch

One of her feather'd creatures broke away,

Sets down her babe, and makes all swift dispatch

In pursuit of the thing she would have stay;

Whilst her neglected child holds her in chase,

Cries to catch her whose busy care is bent

To follow that which flies before her face,

Not prizing her poor infant's discontent:

So runn'st thou after that which flies from thee,

Whilst I, thy babe, chase thee afar behind;

But if thou catch thy hope, turn back to me,

And play the mother's part, kiss me, be kind:

So will I pray that thou may'st have thy _Will_,

If thou turn back, and my loud crying still."

The tenderness of feeling here apparent is characteristic of the poet's

whole attitude of mind in this dual relation. Even when he cannot

acquit his friend of all guilt, even when he mournfully upbraids him

with having robbed the poor man of his one lamb, his chief concern

is always lest any estrangement should arise between his friend and

himself. See, for instance, the exquisitely melodious Sonnet xl.:--

"Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all:

What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?

No love, my love, that thou may'st true love call:

All mine was thine before thou had'st this more.

. . . . . . . . .

I do forgive thy robbery, gentle thief,

Although thou steal thee all my poverty."

The same tone of sentiment runs through the moving Sonnet xlii., which

begins:--

"That thou hast her, it is not all my grief,

And yet it may be said, I loved her dearly;

That she hath thee, is of my wailing chief,

A loss in love that touches me more nearly."

It closes with this somewhat vapid conceit:--

"But here's the joy: my friend and I are one;

Sweet flattery! then she loves but me alone."

All these expressions, taken together, point not only to the enormous

value which Shakespeare attached to the young Pembroke's friendship,

but also to the sensual and spiritual attraction which, in spite of

everything, his fickle mistress continued to possess for him.

It is not impossible that a passage in Ben Jonson's _Bartholomew Fair_

(1614) may contain a satirical allusion to the relation portrayed in

the Sonnets (published in 1609). In act v. sc. 3 there is presented

a puppet-show setting forth "The ancient modern history of Hero and

Leander, otherwise called the Touchstone of true Love, with as true a

trial of Friendship between Damon and Pythias, two faithful friends o'

the Bankside." Hero is "a wench o' the Bankside," and Leander swims

across the Thames to her. Damon and Pythias meet at her lodging, and

abuse each other most violently when they find that they have but one

love, only to finish up as the best friends in the world.[2]

[1] Reproduced in Tyler's _Shakespeare's Sonnets._

[2]

_"Damon_. Whore-master in thy face;

Thou hast lain with her thyself, I'll prove it in this place.

_"Leatherhead_. They are whore-masters both, sir, that's a plain

case.

_"Pythias_. Thou lie like a rogue.

_"Leatherhead_. Do I lie like a rogue?

_"Pythias_. A pimp and a scab.

_"Leatherhead_. A pimp and a scab!

I say, between you _you have both but one drab_.

_"Pythias and Damon_. Come, now we'll go together to breakfast

to Hero.

_"Leatherhead._ Thus, gentles, you perceive without any denial

'Twixt Damon and Pythias here friendship's true trial."

VII

_PLATONISM--SHAKESPEARE'S AND MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS--THE TECHNIQUE

OF THE SONNETS_

The fact that the person to whom Shakespeare's Sonnets are dedicated

is simply entitled "Mr. W. H." long served to divert attention

from William Herbert, as it was thought that it would have been an

impossible impertinence thus to address, without his title, a nobleman

like the Earl of Pembroke. To us it is clear that this form of address

was adopted precisely in order that Pembroke might not be exhibited

to the great public as the hero of the conflict darkly adumbrated

in the Sonnets. They were not, indeed, written quite without an eye

to publication, as is proved by the poet's promises that they are

to immortalise the memory of his friend's beauty. But it was not

Shakespeare himself who gave them to the press, and bookseller Thorpe

must have known very well that Lord Pembroke would not care to see

himself unequivocally designated as the lover of the Dark Lady and the

poet's favoured rival, especially as that dramatic episode of his youth

ended in a manner which it can scarcely have been pleasant to recall.

A weighty work, _A Life of Shakespeare_, published in the year 1898, by

Mr. Sidney Lee, has, however, thoroughly shaken the theories of those

who held Pembroke to be the person to whom the Sonnets were dedicated,

and the youth who inspired so many of them. Mr. Lee, who--rather

arbitrarily--declines to attach any importance to the mention of

Pembroke's name, and the appeal to his relations with Shakespeare

in the folio edition, takes it for granted that Southampton was the

one literary patron to whom Shakespeare expressed his gratitude, and

he concludes that he alone is the hero of the Sonnets. As Mr. Lee

supposes that most of them were written between the spring of 1593 and

the autumn of 1594, Southampton would have been young enough to be

mentioned as in the poems. As to the dedication of the Sonnets, Sidney

Lee declares that it would have been an impossible breach of decorum

to designate a man of such high rank and importance as Pembroke was in

the year 1609 as "Mr. W. H." In his youthful days, even before he had a

right to the title, he was always called Lord Herbert. In 1616 Thorpe

dedicated a book to him in these respectful, nay servile terms: To the

right honourable William, Earle of Pembroke, Lord Chamberlaine to his

Majestie, one of his most honorable Privie Counsell, and Knight of the

Garter, etc.

Sidney Lee interprets the word _begetter_ as procurer merely, and

thinks that Thorpe, in the dedication, simply meant to express his

gratitude to a man who had procured one of the manuscripts of the

Sonnets, then circulating, and had given it to him. And as a dedication

of the poems of the Jesuit Robert Southwell (of 1606), was signed with

the letters W. H., indicating another pirate-editor, William Hall,

Sidney Lee concludes that it was the latter, who three years later had

laid hold of the manuscript of the Sonnets for Thorpe, and that Thorpe

had accordingly placed his enterprise under his patronage. In a domain

where all is obscure it is difficult to uphold a definite opinion in

the face of an opponent so much more learned than myself. Yet I cannot

but feel that there is in the wording of the dedication something quite

incompatible with the idea that Thorpe addresses himself to a friend

and colleague, and Sidney Lee meets this objection only with the remark

that Thorpe was notably careless in the use of language. Besides, it

is suggestive, that in the three existing dedications by Thorpe, other

than that to W. H., the first is addressed to Florio, the two others to

the Earl of Pembroke, consequently to real protectors of rank, while

the one, which he nine years before addressed to the editor, Edward

Blount, who published the manuscript of Marlowe's translation of Lucan

for him, is drawn up in a very different and much more intimate way.

It is addressed to his "kind and true friend," and gives the friend in

question a few hints "as to how to fit himself" for this unaccustomed

part of patron. The distance from this to the dedication of the Sonnets

is great.

What Sidney Lee attempts to prove by his researches and conjectures

is, that the man, who figures in the Sonnets as the protector of the

poet, was Southampton, and not Pembroke. The name of the youth is not

of the first importance, nor does it signify greatly whether the woman

celebrated and attacked in the Sonnets bore the name of Mary Fitton

or another. However, the main point is, that in common with a number

of previous authors, who have thoroughly studied the contemporaneous

literature of Europe, and more especially the sonnet-poetry of Italy,

France and England, such as Delius and Elze in Germany, and Henrik

Schück in Sweden, Lee, relying on the numerous traits that these poems

share with other sonnet-cycles of their period, stamps the whole

argument of the text as fiction, and denies their autobiographical

character. Scarcely any writer before him has so boldly endeavoured to

limit Shakespeare's originality in the domain of sonnet-poetry.

In the first place Lee points out, that the whole body of sixteenth-century

sonnets was so dependent firstly on Petrarch, then on such French

writers as Ronsard, du Bellay and Desportes, that even the finest of

them, the sonnets of Spenser, Sidney, Watson, Lodge, Drayton and Daniel

may be characterised as imitative studies, if not simply as a mosaic

of plagiarisms. Hereupon he tries to show Shakespeare's dependence on

his predecessors. Shakespeare picked up, without scruple, ideas and

expressions from the sonnets published by Daniel, Drayton, Watson,

Barnabe Barnes, Constable and Sidney; he did this as deliberately and

imperturbably as in his comedies he manipulated dramas and novels by

contemporary and older poets. To Drayton especially is Shakespeare

indebted. As all the Englishmen imitated the Frenchmen, Shakespeare has

a false air of having been directly influenced by Ronsard, de Baif and

Desportes, though he scarcely knew these poets in their own language.

The Danish translator of the Sonnets, Adolf Hansen, had already pointed

out numerous impersonal traits. Some of the poorer Sonnets with their

forced and complicated metaphors so obviously bear the impress of

the spirit of the age, that it is quite impossible to regard them as

characteristic of Shakespeare, and some few Sonnets are such complete

imitations, that they cannot be accepted as confessions. Sonnets xviii.

and xix. work out the same idea as Daniel's Delia, and Sonnets lv.

and lxxxi. treat the very same subject as the sixty-ninth Sonnet in

Spenser's _Amoretti_. Finally the story of the friends, one of whom

deprives the other of his mistress, is to be found in Lyly's _Euphues_.

Sidney Lee maintains that when in Sonnets xxiv. and cxxii. Shakespeare

propounds that the image of his friend is engraved in the depths of his

heart, or that his brain is a better memorandum-book, as to the friend,

than the book with which the latter has presented him, he is merely

struggling with conceits of Ronsard's. When in Sonnets xliv, and xlv.

he speaks about man as compounded of the elements, earth, air, fire and

water, he appropriates motives from Spenser and Barnes. Sonnets xlvi.

and xlvii., on the debate of the eye and the heart, are written in

terms borrowed from the twentieth Sonnet in Watson's _Tears of Fancy_.

Where he proclaims his assurance of the immortality of his verse, and

the consequent eternity of his friend's fame, he does not speak from

conviction, he only treats a motive, which, following the example of

Pindar, Horace and Ovid, the Frenchmen Desportes and Ronsard, and after

them such English sonneteers as Spenser, Drayton and Daniel had played

upon. Not even when he writes that his lady is beautiful, though dark,

and consequently unlovely, is he original; for Sidney had already used

a similar phrase. And when he changes his mind, and in the dark eyes

and dark complexion of his lady professes to read the blackness of

her soul, he is even less original, for at that period the sonnet of

invective was the standard variant of the sonnet of amorous eulogy.

Nothing is more common than to find the sonneteer grossly abusing his

mistress. Ronsard called his a tigress, a murderess, a Medusa; Barnabe

Barnes describes his as a tyrant, a Gorgon, a rock; the transition from

tenderness to reproach was so frequent, that it was even parodied by

Gabriel Harvey. Following many other critics Sidney Lee finally points

out that no weight can be attached to the fact, that in Sonnets xxii.,

lxii., lxxiii., and cxxxviii., Shakespeare speaks of himself as old,

for this, too, was a standing conceit of the sonnet-poets of that time.

Daniel in _Delia_ (23) when he was only twenty-nine speaks as if his

life were finished. Richard Barnfield, only twenty years old, invites

the boy Ganymedes to contemplate his silver hair, his wrinkled skin,

the deep furrows of his face, all this in imitation of Petrarch.

Lee admits, however, that the group of Sonnets, most interesting to the

reader, the most mature as to ideas and style, cannot be considered to

date from the poet's thirtieth year; he even thinks that Shakespeare

continued to write Sonnets until 1603, and propounds--regardless of the

wording of the poem--that Sonnet cvii. was written in that year, on the

occasion of the death of Queen Elizabeth. That the word "moon" here

means Elizabeth is obvious. But that the expression

"The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured"

can mean the final eclipse of the moon is incredible. That the moon

has passed through her eclipse, means, I take it, that she is shining

brightly again, and thus the interpretation put forth above, of a hint

at the frustrated conspiracy of Essex, is far more reasonable. But then

this Sonnet, as well as those kindred to it in spirit and tone, point,

not to the year 1603, but to 1601.

Yet here details are of minor importance. We take our stand on a

fundamental conception of poetic production. All art, even that of the

greater artists, begins with imitation; no poet avoids influences,

and up to the present time no poet has hesitated to appropriate from

predecessors all that might be of use to him. Even nowadays, when the

appreciation of the duty of originality is so infinitely stronger than

in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, it is easy

to point out appropriations of foreign thoughts and turns of phrase

among excellent poets, and it would be possible to enumerate a great

variety of common traits among the lyrical poets of Europe. The range

of subjects fit for lyrical poetry is not so very great, to be sure.

As men, lyrists have after all many emotions and conditions in common.

In the mode of expression alone--especially when ideas have to be

expressed in an identical form of fourteen lines--is it possible for

the poet to manifest his true originality.

No intelligent critic would think of looking to lyrical poems as to

biographical sources, in the rough meaning of the term. The poetical

is rarely identical with the personal ego. But on the other hand it

cannot be too strongly insisted upon that books (I mean great, inspired

books, such as are read for hundreds of years) are never engendered

by other books, but by life. Nobody, who has a drop of artist's blood

in his veins, can imagine that a poet of the rank of Shakespeare

can have written sonnets by the score only as exercises or metrical

experiments, without any bearing on his life, its passions and its

crises. The formula for good epic poetry is surely this: that it must

always be founded on real life, even if rarely or never an exact copy

of it. Lyrical poetry, in which the poet speaks in his own name, and

especially of himself, must necessarily, if first-rate, be rooted in

what the poet has felt so strongly that it has made him break into song.

The learned critics of Shakespeare's Sonnets regard them merely as

metrical _tours de force_, penned in cold blood on subjects prescribed

by fashion and convention. They look upon fancy as upon a spider, which

spins chimera in all sorts of typical and artificial figures out of

itself. It seems more natural to look upon it as a plant, extracting

nourishment from the only soil in which it could thrive, namely, the

observations and experiences of the poet.

The great modern poets, whose lives lie open before us, have betrayed

to us how fancy springs out of impressions of real life, transforming

them and making them unrecognisable by its mysterious workings. In

several cases we are able to discern the dispersed elements, which in

due time crystallise in the poem. Discerning criticism has opened our

eyes to the intermixture of these elements in the magic caldron of

fancy, while inferior criticism goes astray in a trivial search after

possible models. In spite of German scholars and their exertions,

we know nothing about whom Goethe had in his mind when he painted

Clärchen, nor is this fact of any importance; but this is certain, that

the whole poetical life-work of Goethe is founded upon experience. When

Max Klinger one evening returned home from having seen a performance of

Goethe's _Faust_, he said: What most impressed me was that it was the

life of Goethe.

As, knowing the life and experiences of the great modern poet, we are

now generally able to trace how these are worked upon and transformed

in his works, it is reasonable to suppose that in olden times poets

were moved by the same causes, and acted in the same way, at least

those of them who have been efficient. When we know of the adventures

and emotions of the modern poet, and are able to trace them in the

production of his free fancy; when it is possible, where they are

unknown to us, to evolve the hidden personality of the poet, and--as

every capable critic has experienced--to have our conjectures finally

borne out by facts revealed by the contemporary author, then we cannot

feel it to be impossible, that in the case of an older poet, we might

also be successful in determining when he speaks earnestly from his

heart, and in tracing his feelings and experiences through his works,

especially when these are lyrical, and their mode of expression

passionate and emotional.

Any one who holds fast to the by no means fantastic theory, that there

is a certain connection between the life and the works of Shakespeare,

will be but little moved by successive attempts to deny the Sonnets any

autobiographical value, because of the conventional traits and frequent

imitations to be pointed out in them.

The modern reader who takes up the Sonnets with no special knowledge of

the Renaissance, its tone of feeling, its relation to Greek antiquity,

its conventions and its poetic style, finds nothing in them more

surprising than the language of love in which the poet addresses his

young friend, the positively erotic passion for a masculine personality

which here finds utterance. The friend is currently addressed as "my

love." Sometimes it is stated in so many words that in the eyes of his

admirer the friend combines the charms of man and woman; for instance,

in Sonnet xx.:--

"A woman's face, with Nature's own hand painted,

Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion."

This Sonnet ends with a playful lament that the friend had not been

born of the opposite sex; yet such is the warmth of expression in other

Sonnets that one very well understands how the critics of last century

supposed them to be addressed to a woman.[1]

This tone, however, is a characteristic fashion of the age. And here,

again, it has been insisted that love for a beautiful youth, which the

study of Plato had presented to the men of the Renaissance in its most

attractive light, was a standing theme among English poets of that

age, who, moreover, as in Shakespeare's case, were wont to praise the

beauty of their friend above that of their mistress. The woman, as in

this case, often enters as a disturbing element into the relation. It

was an accepted part of the convention that the poet as above noted

should represent himself as withered and wrinkled, whatever his real

age might be; Shakespeare does so again and again, though he was at

most thirty-seven. Finally, it was quite in accordance with use and

wont that the fair youth should be exhorted to marry, so that his

beauty might not die with him. Shakespeare had already placed such

exhortations in the mouth of the Goddess of Love in _Venus and Adonis_.

All this is true, and yet there is no reasonable ground for doubting

that the Sonnets stand in pretty close relation to actual facts.

The age, indeed, determines the tone, the colouring, of the expressions

in which friendship clothes itself. In Germany and Denmark, at the end

of the eighteenth century, friendship was a sentimental enthusiasm,

just as in England and Italy during the sixteenth century it took

the form of platonic love. We can clearly discern, however, that the

different methods of expression answered to corresponding shades of

difference in the emotion itself. The men of the Renaissance gave

themselves up to an adoration of friendship and of their friend which

is now unknown, except in circles where a perverted sexuality prevails.

Montaigne's friendship for Estienne de la Boétie, and Languet's

passionate tenderness for the youthful Philip Sidney, are cases in

point. The observations concerning friendship in Sir Thomas Browne's

_Religio Medici_, 1642 (pp. 98, 99), accord entirely with that of

Shakespeare: "I love my friend more than myself, and yet I think that

I do not love him enough. In a few months my manifold doubled passion

will make me believe that I have not at all loved him before. When I am

away from him, I am dead, until I meet him again. When I am together

with him, I am not content, but always long for a closer connection

with him. United souls are not contented, but wish for being truly

identical with each other; and this being impossible, their yearnings

are endless and must increase without any possibility of being

gratified." But the most remarkable example of a frenzied friendship in

Renaissance culture and poetry is undoubtedly to be found in Michael

Angelo's letters and sonnets.

Michael Angelo's relation to Messer Tommaso de' Cavalieri presents the

most interesting parallel to the attitude which Shakespeare adopted

towards William Herbert. We find the same expressions of passionate

love from the older to the younger man; but here it is still more

unquestionably certain that we have not to do with mere poetical

figures of speech, since the letters are not a whit less ardent and

enthusiastic than the sonnets. The expressions in the sonnets are

sometimes so warm that Michael Angelo's nephew, in his edition of them,

altered the word _Signiore_ into _Signora_, and these poems, like

Shakespeare's, were for some time supposed to have been addressed to a

woman.[2]

On January 1, 1533, Michael Angelo, then fifty-seven years old, writes

from Florence to Tommaso de' Cavalieri, a youth of noble Roman family,

who afterwards became his favourite pupil: "If I do not possess the

art of navigating the sea of your potent genius, that genius will

nevertheless excuse me, and neither despise my inequality, nor demand

of me that which I have it not in me to give; since that which stands

alone in everything can in nothing find its counterpart. Wherefore your

lordship, _the only light in our age vouchsafed to this worlds_ having

no equal or peer, cannot find satisfaction in the work of any other

hand. If, therefore, this or that in the works which I hope and promise

to execute should happen to please you, I should call that work, not

good, but fortunate. And if I should ever feel assured that--as has

been reported to me--I have given your lordship satisfaction in one

thing or another, I will make a gift to you of my present and of all

that the future may bring me; and it will be a great pain to me to be

unable to recall the past, in order to serve you so much the longer,

instead of having only the future, which cannot be long, since I am all

too old. There is nothing more left for me to say. Read my heart and

not my letter, for my pen cannot approach the expression of my good

will."[3]

Cavalieri writes to Michael Angelo that he regards himself as born

anew since he has come to know the Master; who replies, "I for my part

should regard myself as not born, born dead, or deserted by heaven and

earth, if your letters had not brought me the persuasion that your

lordship accepts with favour certain of my works." And in a letter of

the following summer to Sebastian del Piombo, he sends a greeting to

Messer Tommaso, with the words: "I believe _I should instantly fall

down dead_ if he were no longer in my thoughts."[4]

Michael Angelo plays upon his friend's surname as Shakespeare plays

upon his friend's Christian name. These are the last lines of the

thirty-first sonnet:--

"Se vint' e pres' i' debb' esser beato,

Meraviglia non è se, nud' e solo,

Resto prigion d'un _Cavalier_ armato."

"If only chains and bands can make me blest,

No marvel if alone and bare I go

An armed knight's captive and slave confessed."

(_J. A. Symonds_.)

In other sonnets the tone is no less passionate than Shakespeare's

--take, for example, the twenty-second:--

"More tenderly perchance than is my due,

Your spirit sees into my heart, where rise

The flames of holy worship, nor denies

The grace reserved for those who humbly sue.

Oh blessed day when you at last are mine!

Let time stand still, and let noon's chariot stay;

Fixed be that moment on the dial of heaven!

That I may clasp and keep, by grace divine--

Clasp in these yearning arms and keep for aye

My heart's loved lord to me desertless given."[5]

(_J. A. Symonds_.)

In comparison with Cavalieri, Michael Angelo could with justice call

himself old. Some critics, on the other hand, have seen in the fact

that Shakespeare was not really old at the time when the Sonnets were

written, a proof of their conventional and unreal character. But this

is to overlook the relativity of the term. As compared with a youth of

eighteen, Shakespeare was in effect old, with his sixteen additional

years and all his experience of life. And if we are right in assigning

Sonnets lxiii. and lxxiii. to the year 1600 or 1601, Shakespeare had

then reached the age of thirty-seven, an age at which (among his

contemporaries) Drayton in his _Idea_ dwells quite in the same spirit

upon the wrinkles of age in his face, and at which, as Tyler has very

aptly pointed out, Byron in his swan-song uses expressions about

himself which might have been copied from Shakespeare's seventy-third

Sonnet. Shakespeare says:--

"That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When _yellow leaves_, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold

Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang."

Byron thus expresses himself:--

"My days are in _the yellow leaf_,[6]

The flowers and fruits of love are gone,

The worm, the canker and the grief

Are mine alone."

In Shakespeare we read:--

"In me thou seest _the glowing of such fire_

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie

As the _death-bed_ whereon it must expire,

Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by."

Byron's words are:--

"_The fire that on my bosom preys_

Is lone as some volcanic isle;

No torch is kindled at its blaze--

_A funeral pile_"

Thus both poets liken themselves, at this comparatively early age, to

the wintry woods with their yellowing leaves, and without blossom,

fruit, or the song of birds; and both compare the fire which still

glows in their soul to a solitary flame which finds no nourishment from

without. The ashes of my youth become its death-bed, says Shakespeare.

They are a funeral pile, says Byron.

Nor is it possible to conclude, as Schück does, from the conventional

style of the first seventeen Sonnets--for instance, from their almost

verbal identity with a passage in Sidney's _Arcadia_--that they are

quite devoid of relation to the poet's own life.

In short, the elements of temporary fashion and convention which appear

in the Sonnets in no way prove that they were not genuine expressions

of the poet's actual feelings.

They lay bare to us a side of his character which does not appear in

the plays. We see in him an emotional nature with a passionate bent

towards self-surrender in love and idolatry, and with a corresponding,

though less excessive, yearning to be loved.

We learn from the Sonnets to what a degree Shakespeare was oppressed

and tormented by his sense of the contempt in which the actor's calling

was held. The scorn of ancient Rome for the mountebank, the horror of

ancient Judea for whoever disguised himself in the garments of the

other sex, and finally the age-old hatred of Christianity for theatres

and all the temptations that follow in their train--all these habits

of thought had been handed down from generation to generation, and, as

Puritanism grew in strength and gained the upper hand, had begotten a

contemptuous tone of public opinion under which so sensitive a nature

as Shakespeare's could not but suffer keenly. He was not regarded as

a poet who now and then acted, but as an actor who now and then wrote

plays. It was a pain to him to feel that he belonged to a caste which

had no civic status. Hence his complaint, in Sonnet xxix., of being "in

disgrace with fortune and men's eyes." Hence, in Sonnet xxxvi., his

assurance to his friend that he will not obtrude on others the fact of

their friendship:--

"I may not evermore acknowledge thee,

Lest my bewailèd guilt should do thee shame:

Nor thou with public kindness honour me,

Unless thou take that honour from thy name:

But do not so; I love thee in such sort,

As, thou being mine, mine is thy good report."

The bitter complaint in Sonnet lxxii. seems rather to refer to the

writer's situation as a dramatist:--

"For I am shamed by that which I bring forth,

And so should you, to love things nothing worth."

The melancholy which fills Sonnet cx. is occasioned by the writer's

profession and his nature as a poet and artist:--

"Alas! 'tis true, I have gone here and there,

And made myself a motley to the view;

Gor'd mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,

Made old offences of affections new:

Most true it is, that I have look'd on truth

Askance and strangely; but, by all above,

These blenches gave my heart another youth,

And worse essays prov'd thee my best of love."

Hence, finally, his reproach to Fortune, in Sonnet cxi., that she did

not "better for his life provide Than public means which public manners

breeds":--

"Thence comes it that my name receives a brand;

And almost thence my nature is subdu'd

To what it works in, like the dyer's hand."

We must bear in mind this continual writhing under the prejudice

against his calling and his art, and this indignation at the injustice

of the attitude adopted towards them by a great part of the middle

classes, if we would understand the high pressure of Shakespeare's

feelings towards the noble youth who had approached him full of the

art-loving traditions of the aristocracy, and the burning enthusiasm

of the young for intellectual superiority. William Herbert, with his

beauty and his personal charm, must have come to him like a very angel

of light, a messenger from a higher world than that in which his lot

was cast. He was a living witness to the fact that Shakespeare was not

condemned to seek the applause of the multitude alone, but could win

the favour of the noblest in the land, and was not excluded from a deep

and almost passionate friendship which placed him on an equal footing

with the bearer of an ancient name. Pembroke's great beauty no doubt

made a deep impression upon the beauty-lover in Shakespeare's soul.

It is very probable, too, that the young aristocrat, according to the

fashion of the times, made the poet his debtor for solider benefactions

than mere friendship; and Shakespeare must thus have felt doubly

painful the situation in which he was placed by the intrigue between

his mistress and his friend.[7].

In any case, the affection with which Pembroke inspired

Shakespeare--the passionate attachment, leading even to jealousy of

other poets admired by the young nobleman--had not only a vividness,

but an erotic fervour such as we never find in our century manifested

between man and man. Note such an expression as this in Sonnet cx.:--

"Then give me welcome, next my heaven the best,

Even to thy pure and most most loving breast."

This exactly corresponds to Michael Angelo's recently-quoted desire to

"clasp in his yearning arms his heart's loved lord." Or observe such a

line as this in Sonnet lxxv.:--

"So are you to my thoughts as food to life."

We have here an exact counterpart to the following expressions in a

letter from Michael Angelo to Cavalieri, dated July 1533: "I would far

rather forget the food on which I live, which wretchedly sustains the

body alone, than your name, which sustains both body and soul, filling

both with such happiness that I can feel neither care nor fear of death

while I have it in my memory."[8]

The passionate fervour of this friendship on the Platonic model is

accompanied in Shakespeare, as in Michael Angelo, by a submissiveness

on the part of the elder friend towards the younger, which, in these

two supreme geniuses, affects the modern reader painfully. Each had put

off every shred of pride in relation to his idolised young friend. How

strange it seems to find Shakespeare calling himself young Herbert's

"slave," and assuring him that his time, more precious than that of

any other man then living, is of no value, so that his friend may let

him wait or summon him to his side as his caprice and fancy dictate.

In Sonnet lviii. he speaks of "that God who made me first your slave."

Sonnet lvii. runs thus:--

"Being _your slave_, what should I do but tend

Upon the hours and times of your desire?

I have no precious time at all to spend,

Nor services to do, till you require.

Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour,

Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you,

Nor think the bitterness of absence sour,

When you have bid your servant once adieu;

Nor dare I question with my jealous thought,

Where you may be, or your affairs suppose;

But, like a sad slave, stay and think of nought,

Save, where you are how happy you make those."

Just as Michael Angelo spoke to Cavalieri of his works as though

they were scarcely worth his friend's notice, so does Shakespeare

sometimes speak of his verses. In Sonnet xxxii. he begs his friends to

"re-survey" them when he is dead:--

"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."

This humility becomes quite despicable when a breach is threatened

between the friends. Shakespeare then repeatedly promises so to blacken

himself that his friend shall reap, not shame, but honour, from his

faithlessness. In Sonnet lxxxviii.:--

"With mine own weakness being best acquainted,

Upon thy part I can set down a story

Of faults concealed wherein I am attainted,

That thou, in losing me, shalt win much glory."

Sonnet lxxxix. is still more strongly worded:--

"Thou canst not, love, disgrace me half so ill,

To set a form upon desirèd change,

As I'll myself disgrace: knowing thy will,

I will acquaintance strangle, and look strange;

Be absent from thy walks; and in my tongue

Thy sweet-belovèd name no more shall dwell,

Lest I (too much profane) should do it wrong,

And haply of our old acquaintance tell.

For thee, against myself I'll vow debate,

For I must ne'er love him whom thou dost hate."

We are positively surprised when, in a single passage, in Sonnet lxii.,

we come upon a forcible expression of self-love; but it does not extend

beyond the first half of the Sonnet; in the second half this self-love

is already regarded as a sin, and Shakespeare humbly effaces himself

before his friend. All the more gladly does the reader welcome the few

Sonnets (lv. and lxxxi.) in which the poet confidently predicts the

immortality of these his utterances. It is true that Shakespeare is

here greatly influenced by antiquity and by the fashion of his age;

and it is simply as records of his friend's beauty and amiability that

his verses are to be preserved through all ages to come. But no poet

without a sound and vigorous self-confidence could have written either

these lines in Sonnet lv.:--

"Not marble, nor the gilded monuments

Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme"--

or these others in Sonnet lxxxi.:--

"Your monument shall be my gentle verse,

Which eyes not yet created shall o'erread;

And tongues to be your being shall rehearse,

When all the breathers of this world are dead."

Yet, as we see, the first and last thought is always that of the

friend, his beauty, worth, and fame. And as he will live in the

future, so he has lived in the past. Shakespeare cannot conceive

existence without him. In Sonnets which have no direct connection with

each other (lix., cvi., cxxiii.) he returns again and again to that

strange thought of a perpetual cycle or recurrence of events, which

runs through the whole of the world's history, from the Pythagoreans

and Kohélet to Friedrich Nietzsche. In view of such high-pitched

idolatry, we can well understand that the friend's faithlessness, or,

if you will, the mistress's conquest of the friend, and the sudden

severance of the bond in 1601, must have made a deep impression upon

Shakespeare's sensitive soul. The catastrophe left its mark upon him

for many a long day.

And at the same time another and purely personal mortification was

added to his troubles. Shakespeare's name was just then involved in

a degrading scandal of one sort or another. He says so expressly in

Sonnet cxii.:--

"Your love and pity doth the impression fill

Which vulgar scandal stamped upon my brow."

He here avers that he cares very little "to know his shames or praises"

from the tongues of others, and that his friend's judgment is all in

all to him; but in Sonnet cxxi., where he goes more closely into the

matter, he confesses that some "frailty" in him has given rise to these

malignant rumours, and we see that for this frailty his "sportive

blood" was to blame. He does not deny the accusation, but asks--

"Why should others' false adulterate eyes

Give salutation to my sportive blood?

Or on my frailties why are frailer spies,

Which in their wills count bad what I think good?"

The details of this scandal are unknown to us. We can only conclude

that it referred to Shakespeare's alleged relation to some woman, or

implication in some amorous adventure. In discussing this point, Tyler

has aptly cited two passages in contemporary writings, though of course

without absolutely proving that they have any bearing on the matter.

The first is the above-quoted anecdote in John Manningham's Diary for

March 13, 1601 (New Style, 1602), as to Shakespeare's forestalling

Burbadge in the graces of a citizen's wife, and announcing himself as

"William the Conqueror "--an anecdote which seems to have been widely

current at the time, and no doubt arose from more or less recent

events. The second passage occurs in _The Returne from Pernassus_,

dating from December 1601, in which (iv. 3) Burbadge and Kemp are

introduced, and these words are placed in the mouth of Kemp: "O that

_Ben Ionson_ is a pestilent fellow, he brought vp _Horace_ giuing the

Poets a pill, but our fellow _Shakespeare_ hath giuen him a purge

that made him beray his credit." The allusion is evidently to the

feud between Ben Jonson on the one hand and Marston and Dekker on the

other, which culminated in 1601 with the appearance of Ben Jonson's

_Poetaster_, in which Horace serves as the poet's mouthpiece. Dekker

and Marston retorted in the same year with _Satiromastix, or the

Untrussing of the Humorous Poet_. As Shakespeare took no direct part

in this quarrel, we can only conjecture what is meant by the above

allusion. Mr. Richard Simpson has suggested that King William Rufus, in

whose reign the action of _Satiromastix_ takes place, and who "presides

over the untrussing of the humorous poet," may be intended for William

Shakespeare. Rufus, in the play, is by no means a model of chastity,

and carries off Walter Terrill's bride very much as "William the

Conqueror" in Manningham's anecdote carries off "Richard the Third's"

mistress. Simpson thinks it probable that the spectators would have

little difficulty in recognising the William the Conqueror of the

anecdote in the William Rufus of the play, whose nickname, indeed,

might be taken as referring to Shakespeare's complexion. If we accept

this interpretation, we find in _Satiromastix_ a further proof of the

notoriety of the anecdote. Whether it be this scandal or another of the

same kind to which the Sonnets refer, Shakespeare seems to have taken

greatly to heart the besmirching of his name.

It remains that we should glance at the form of the Sonnets and say a

word as to their poetic value.

As regards the form, the first and most obvious remark is that, in

spite of their name, these poems are not in reality sonnets at all, and

have, indeed, nothing in common with the sonnet except their fourteen

lines. In the structure of his so-called Sonnets Shakespeare simply

followed the tradition and convention of his country.

Sir Thomas Wyatt, the leading figure in the earlier English school of

lyrists, travelled in Italy in the year 1527, familiarised himself with

the forms and style of Italian poetry, and introduced the sonnet into

English literature. A somewhat younger poet, Henry, Earl of Surrey,

soon followed in his footsteps; he, too, travelled in Italy, and

cultivated the same poetic models. Not until after the death of both

poets were their sonnets published in the collection known as _Tottel's

Miscellany_ (1557). Neither of the poets succeeded in keeping to the

Petrarchan model--an octave and a sestett. Wyatt, it is true, usually

preserves the octave, but breaks up the sestett and finishes with a

couplet. Surrey departs still more widely from his model's strict and

difficult form: his "Sonnet" consists, like Shakespeare's after him,

of three quatrains and a couplet, the rhymes of which are in nowise

interwoven. Sidney, again, preserved the octave, but broke up the

sestett. Spenser attempted a new rhyme-scheme, interweaving the second

and third quatrain, but keeping to the final couplet. Daniel, who is

Shakespeare's immediate predecessor and master, returns to Surrey's

really formless form. The chief defect in Shakespeare's Sonnets as a

metrical whole consists in the appended couplet, which hardly ever

keeps up to the level of the beginning, hardly ever presents any

picture to the eye, but is, as a rule, merely reflective, and often

brings the burst of feeling which animates the poem to a feeble, or at

any rate more rhetorical than poetic, issue.

In actual poetic value the Sonnets are extremely uneven. The first

group as we have already pointed out (p. 270) stands lowest in the

scale, necessarily expressing but little of the poet's personal feeling.

The last two Sonnets in the collection (cliii. and cliv.), dealing

with a conventional theme borrowed from the antique, are likewise

entirely impersonal. W. Hertzberg, having been put on the track by

Herr von Friesen, in 1878 discovered the Greek original of these two

Sonnets in the ninth book of the Palatine Anthology.[9]. The poem

which Shakespeare has adapted, and in Sonnet cliv. almost translated,

was written by the Byzantine scholar Marianus, probably in the fifth

century after Christ; it was published in Latin, among other epigrams,

at Basle in 1529, was retranslated several times before the end of the

sixteenth century, and must have become known to Shakespeare in one or

other of these different forms.

Next in order stand the Sonnets of merely conventional inspiration,

those in which the eye and heart go to law with each other, or in

which the poet plays upon his own name and his friend's. These cannot

possibly claim any high poetic value.

But the poems thus set apart form but a small minority of the

collection. In all the others the waves of feeling run high, and it

may be said in general that the deeper the sentiment and the stronger

the emotion they express, the more admirable is their force of diction

and their marvellous melody. There are Sonnets whose musical quality

is unsurpassed by any of the songs introduced into the plays, or even

by the most famous and beautiful speeches in the plays themselves.

The free and lax form he had adopted was of evident advantage to

Shakespeare. The triple and quadruple rhymes, which in Italian involve

scarcely any difficulty or constraint, would have proved very hampering

in English. As a matter of fact, Shakespeare has been able to follow

out every inspiration unimpeded by the shackles of an elaborate

rhyme-scheme, and has achieved a rare combination of terseness

and harmony in the expression of sorrow, melancholy, anguish, and

resignation. Nothing can be more melodious than the opening of Sonnet

xl., quoted above, or these lines from Sonnet lxxxvi.:--

"Was it the proud full sail of his great verse,

Bound for the prize of all-too-precious you,

That did my ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse,

Making their tomb the womb wherein they grew?"

And how moving is the earnestness of Sonnet cxvi., on faith in love:--

"Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O, no! it is an ever-fixèd mark,

That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken."

Shakespeare's Sonnets are for the general reader the most inaccessible

of his works, but they are also the most difficult to tear oneself away

from. "With this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart," says Wordsworth;

and some people are repelled from them by the _Menschliches_, or, as

they think, _Allzumenschliches_, which is there revealed. They at

any rate hold Shakespeare diminished by his openness. Browning, for

example, thus retorts upon Wordsworth:--

"'With this same key

Shakespeare unlocked his heart' once more!

Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he."

The reader who can reconcile himself to the fact that great geniuses

are not necessarily models of correctness will pass a very different

judgment. He will follow with eager interest the experiences which

rent and harrowed Shakespeare's soul. He will rejoice in the insight

afforded by these poems, which the crowd ignores, into the tempestuous

emotional life of one of the greatest of men. Here, and here alone,

we see Shakespeare himself, as distinct from his poetical creations,

loving, admiring, longing, yearning, adoring, disappointed, humiliated,

tortured. Here alone does he enter the confessional. Here more than

anywhere else can we, who at a distance of three centuries do homage to

the poet's art, feel ourselves in intimate communion, not only with the

poet, but with the man.

[1] For instance, in Sonnet xxiii.:--

"O let my books be then the eloquence

And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,

Who plead for love, and look for recompense."

And in Sonnet xxvi.:--

"Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage

Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit.

[2] Ludwig von Scheffler: _Michel Angelo. Eine

Renaissancestudie_, 1892.