ON THE LOVE OF SHAKSPEARE.
Shakspeare--I approach the subject with reverence, and even with
fear,--is the only poet I am acquainted with and able to appreciate, who
appears to have been really heaven-inspired: the workings of his
wondrous and all-embracing mind were directed by a higher influence than
ever was exercised by woman, even in the plenitude of her power and her
charms. Shakspeare's genius waited not on Love and Beauty, but Love and
Beauty ministered to _him_; he perceived like a spirit; he was created,
to create; his own individuality is lost in the splendour, the reality,
and the variety of his own conceptions. When I think what those are, I
feel how needless, how vain it were to swell the universal voice with
one so weak as mine. Who would care for it that knows and feels
Shakspeare? Who would listen to it that does not, if there be such?
It is not Shakspeare as a great power bearing a great name,--but
Shakspeare in his less divine and less known character,--as a lover and
a man, who finds a place here. The only writings he has left, through
which we can trace any thing of his personal feelings and affections,
are his Sonnets. Every one who reads them, who has tenderness or taste,
will echo Wordsworth's denunciation against the "flippant insensibility"
of some of his commentators, who talked of an Act of Parliament not
being strong enough to compel their perusal, and will agree in his
opinion, that they are full of the most exquisite feelings, most
felicitously expressed; but as to the object to whom they were
addressed, a difference of opinion prevails. From a reference, however,
to all that is known of Shakspeare's life and fortunes, compared with
the internal presumptive evidence contained in the Sonnets, it appears
that some of them are addressed to his amiable friend, Lord Southampton;
and others, I think, are addressed in Southampton's name, to that
beautiful Elizabeth Vernon, to whom the Earl was so long and ardently
attached.[94] The Queen, who did not encourage matrimony among her
courtiers, absolutely refused her consent to their union. She treated
him as she did Raleigh in the affair of Elizabeth Throckmorton; and
Southampton, after four years of impatient submission and still
increasing love, as tenderly returned by his mistress, married without
the Queen's knowledge, lost her favour for ever, and had nearly lost his
head.[95]
That Lord Southampton is the subject of the first fifty-five Sonnets is
sufficiently clear; and some of these are perfectly beautiful,--as the
30th, 32d, 41st, 54th. There are others scattered through the rest of
the volume, on the same subject; but there are many which admit of no
such interpretation, and are without doubt inspired by the real object
of a real passion, of whom nothing can be discovered, but that she was
dark-eyed[96] and dark-haired,[96] that she excelled in music;[97] and
that she was one of a class of females who do not always, in losing all
right to our respect, lose also their claim to the admiration of the sex
who wronged them, or the compassion of the gentler part of their own,
who have rejected them. This is so clear from various passages, that
unhappily there can be no doubt of it.[98] He has flung over her,
designedly it should seem, a veil of immortal texture and fadeless hues,
"branched and embroidered like the painted Spring," but almost
impenetrable even to our imagination. There are few allusions to her
personal beauty, which can in any way individualise her, but bursts of
deep and passionate feeling, and eloquent reproach, and contending
emotions, which show, that if she could awaken as much love and impart
as much happiness as woman ever inspired or bestowed, he endured on her
account all the pangs of agony, and shame, and jealousy;--that our
Shakspeare,--he who, in the omnipotence of genius, wielded the two
worlds of reality and imagination in either hand, who was in conception
and in act scarce less than a GOD, was in passion and suffering not more
than MAN.
Instead of any elaborate description of her person, we have, in the only
sonnet which sets forth her charms, the rich materials of a picture,
rather than the picture itself.
The forward violet thus did I chide:
Sweet thief, whence didst thou steal thy sweet that smells,
If not from my Love's breath? The purple pride
Which on thy soft cheek for complexion dwells,
In my Love's veins thou hast too grossly dy'd.
The lily I condemned for thy hand,
And buds of marjoram had stolen thy hair:
The roses fearfully on thorns did stand,
One blushing shame, another white despair:
A third, nor red nor white, had stolen of both,
And to his robbery had annex'd thy breath;
But for his theft, in pride of all his growth
A vengeful canker eat him up to death.
More flowers I noted, yet I none could see,
But sweet, or colour, it had stolen from thee.
He intimates that he found a rival in one of his own most intimate
friends, who was also a poet.[99] He laments her absence in this
exquisite strain;--
How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen,
What old December's bareness everywhere!
....*....*....*....*
For Summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And thou away, the very birds are mute!
He dwells with complacency on her supposed truth and tenderness, her
bounty, like Juliet's, "boundless as the sea, her love as deep."
Kind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind,
Still constant in a wondrous excellence.
Then, as if conscious upon how unstable a foundation he had built his
love, he expresses his fear lest he should be betrayed, yet remain
unconscious of the wrong.
For there can live no hatred in thine eye,
Therefore in that I cannot know thy change!
In many looks, the false heart's history
Is writ in moods and frowns, and wrinkles strange.
But heaven in thy creation did decree,
That in thy face sweet love should ever dwell.
He bitterly reproaches her with her levity and falsehood, and himself
that he can be thus unworthily enslaved,--
What potions have I drunk of Syren tears, &c.
Then, with lover-like inconsistency, excuses her,--
As on the finger of a throned queen
The basest jewel will be well esteemed:
So are those errors that in thee are seen
To truths translated, and for true things deem'd.
And the following are powerfully and painfully expressive:--
How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame,
Which, like the canker in a fragrant rose,
Doth spot the beauty of thy budding name!
Oh, in what sweets dost thou thy sins enclose!
And what a mansion have those vices got,
Which for their habitation chose out thee,
Where Beauty's veil doth cover every blot,
And all things turn to fair that eyes can see!
"Who taught thee," he says in another sonnet,
--to make me love thee more
The more I hear, and see just cause for hate?
He who wrote these and similar passages was certainly under the full and
irresistible influence of female fascination. But who it was that thus
ruled the universal heart and mighty spirit of our Shakspeare, we know
not. She stands beside him a veiled and a nameless phantom. Neither dare
we call in Fancy to penetrate that veil; for who would presume to trace
even the faintest outline of such a being as Shakspeare could have
loved?
* * * * *
I think it doubtful to whom were addressed those exquisite lines,
Then hate me when thou wilt, if ever, now! &c.[100]
but probably to this very person.
The Sonnets in which he alludes to his profession as an actor; where he
speaks of the brand, "which vulgar scandal stamped upon his brow," and
of having made himself "a motley to men's view,"[101] are undoubtedly
addressed to Lord Southampton.
O, for my sake, do you with fortune chide
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide,
Than publick 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.
Pity me then, and wish I were renew'd.
The last I shall remark, perhaps the finest of all, and breathing the
very soul of profound tenderness and melancholy feeling, must, I think,
have been addressed to a female.
No longer mourn for me when I am dead,
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile earth, with vilest worms to dwell:
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
O if (I say) you look upon this verse,
When I perhaps compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse;
But let your love even with my life decay:
Lest the wise world should look into your moan,
And mock you with me after I am gone.
The period assigned to the composition of these Sonnets, and the
attachment which inspired them, is the time when Shakspeare was living a
wild and irregular life, between the court and the theatre, after his
flight from Stratford. He had previously married, at the age of
seventeen, Judith Hathaway, who was eight or ten years older than
himself: he returned to his native town, after having sounded all depths
of life, of nature, of passion, and ended his days as the respected
father of a family, in calm, unostentatious privacy.
One thing I will confess:--It is natural to feel an intense and
insatiable curiosity relative to great men, a curiosity and interest for
which nothing can be too minute, too personal.--And yet when I had
ransacked all that had ever been written, discovered, or surmised,
relative to Shakspeare's private life, for the purpose of throwing some
light upon his Sonnets, I felt no gratification, no thankfulness to
those whose industry had raked up the very few particulars which can be
known. It is too much, and it is not enough: it disappoints us in one
point of view--it is superfluous in another: what need to surround with
common-place, trivial associations, registers of wills and genealogies,
and I know not what,--the mighty spirit who in dying left behind him not
merely a name and fame, but a perpetual being, a presence and a power,
identified with our nature, diffused through all time, and ruling the
heart and the fancy with an uncontrollable and universal sway!
I rejoice that the name of no one woman is popularly identified with
that of Shakspeare. He belongs to us all!--the creator of Desdemona, and
Juliet, and Ophelia, and Imogen, and Viola, and Constance, and Cornelia,
and Rosalind, and Portia, was not the poet of one woman, but the POET OF
WOMANKIND.
FOOTNOTES:
[94] She was the grandmother of Lady Russell.
[95] Elizabeth Vernon was first cousin to Essex. "Was it treason?" asks
Essex indignantly, in one of his eloquent letters; "Was it treason in my
Lord of Southampton to marry my poor kinswoman, that neither long
imprisonment, nor any punishment besides that hath been usual in such
cases can satisfy or appease?"
[96] Sonnets 127, 130
[97] Sonnet 128.
[98] See "Douce's Illustrations of Shakspeare."
[99] Sonnets 80, 83.
[100] Sonnet 172.
[101] Sonnets 110, 111.