invasion; gentlemen all over the country served in the ranks; it is
possible that Shakespeare either served on board a ship or in the army
at Tilbury, which the Queen herself went to address. If he did, he
would be among the disbanded men in 1588, still seeking a post. There
were men of lower rank he was almost sure to know; Sadler and Quiney,
the grocers in Bucklersbury; John Shakespeare, the bit-maker of St.
Martin in the Fields (not the later John of St. Clement Danes); Mathew
Shakespeare, the goldsmith, who had married the sister of George Peele,
the dramatist. With none of these did he seem to associate himself.
But we have testimony that he did associate himself very freely with
Richard Field. We see the suggestions of the books printed by him on
many a page of Shakespeare’s works, and reading through the signs of
his familiarity with the printer’s art we may well believe that he
tried to give some return for hospitality by helping Field as much as
he _dared_ do. There was a limit, for the Stationers’ Company was very
jealous of unapprenticed workmen, and fined Richard Field for keeping
one. But there was nothing to prevent Shakespeare from helping in
reading and correcting proof, and in 1589 Field brought out Puttenham’s
“Art of English Poetry,” a liberal education to a would-be writer.
Other special works were on Field’s shelves. A new edition of “Ovid,”
Sir Thomas North’s translation of “Plutarch’s Lives,” “Salust du
Bartas,” books on Music, Medicine, History, and Philosophy, which we
can also see reflected in Shakespeare’s works. I could never satisfy
myself with a natural reason for the inter-weaving of Giordano Bruno’s
thought into the sonnets until I found that Vautrollier had printed his
works, which were condemned, and he himself had to fly the country on
account of them, flying, however, no further than Scotland, where the
King welcomed him, and let him print his own new book “The essayes of a
prentis, in the divine Art of Poesy.”
From the beginning of Shakespeare’s career he must have earned the
epithet applied to him later by a fellow dramatist, Webster, who, in
the introduction to Vittoria Corambona, spoke of “The right happy and
copious _industry_ of Master Shakespeare.”
He was preparing for a patron by the time he found one, but he had been
forced, through the stress of circumstances, to take advantage of the
only opportunity which had been opened to him, that is, on the stage,
where his handsome figure would recommend him, and he probably had
some influence through Warwickshire acquaintances. But it would take
three years at least for any one to acquire the position outlined by
Greene, so we may suppose that he entered the theatre as a “servitor”
or apprentice in or about 1589. His work must have, at first, been
hard, as he had to be trained, and from the Sonnets it was evidently
distasteful.
The consideration of all the various opinions on, and interpretations
of, the Sonnets would necessitate more space than can at present be
given. Writers have differed widely concerning their autobiographical
value, and those who do believe them to be autobiographical, disagree
concerning the identity of the persons addressed, of the rival poets,
and of Mr. W. H.
I believe that the Sonnets are a source of some authority, both
biographical and autobiographical, but that they cannot be interpreted
in crude realism. Shakespeare was not a prose diarist of the twentieth
century, but a poet on the rising high tide of the most creative period
of English literature, in the first fervours of poetic inspiration and
romantic personal affection. After a period of trial, during which
he had been agonizing in order to live and to support the lives of
those that were dear to him, he had met some one who had the supreme
inspiration to encourage and to help him in the way he needed.
Many of the allusions to conversations, common experiences, and common
studies, are lost to the readers of later days, but some of the links
of association may be restored by careful comparison. Sometimes the
poet was only treating a common theme in hackneyed phrases, sometimes
he was only transmuting current philosophy into verse, But sometimes
he was trying to express feelings that lay too deep for words; his
love and gratitude occasionally led him to impulsive exaggerations,
his susceptibility to hasty misunderstandings. He knew how “to tear a
passion to tatters, to very rags,” when his thoughts hurtled against
each other from their very abundance and exuberance. But the twined
threads of biography and autobiography are there, on which to string
the pearls of Shakespeare’s thought. These threads can only be wound
round the neck of Henry, the third Earl of Southampton.
No wrong has ever been done to Shakespeare’s memory so great as the
publication of what has been called “the Herbert-Fitton theory.” The
only cure for this, as for any other heresy, is _more study_, patient,
unprejudiced, wide-reaching, long-enduring study, not only in the
direct biography of the two men, but in contemporary life, thought,
and literature. The theory was only possible to a real worker like Mr.
Tylor, because he neglected the Baconian scientific advice, “to search
after negatives.” He only attended to facts that seemed to support
his hypothesis, and turned from those that opposed it, even when laid
before him. Yet he has found followers numerous enough and important
enough to be combated because they blind the multitude to other truths.
The Herbert-Fitton theory assumes that the Sonnets must have been
written after the arrival of Lord Herbert at Court. This was in the
spring of 1598, he being then eighteen years old. We are asked to
imagine therefore that Shakespeare instantly was introduced to him,
immediately began to write quatorzains, or disingenuously pretended to
do so for the _first time_ at this late date in the sonnet-harvest,
ascribing to the newly-arrived Lord Herbert, not only inspiration, but
_education out of rude ignorance_, and the guidance of his _pupil-pen_,
_after_ he had written, not only both of his poems, but his “Midsummer
Night’s Dream,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “The Merchant of Venice,” many
other plays, and some of the Sonnets themselves in other plays.
It presumes that he must have warmed up, for this inexperienced young
lord, not only the same feelings that he had formerly expressed for
another, but the same _phrases_ that he had already _published_. The
whole beauty of “_the passion_” dies out before the supposition. We
cannot read the Sonnets as hackneyed imitations of past fashions. They
have all the _verve_ of a fresh impulse, all the ideal transport of
newly discovered power, all the original treatment of newly acquired
music. Little in the data fits the supposition. Lord Herbert was _not_
the sole hope of his great house, having both a father and a brother;
he was _not_ a _fair_ youth, but exceptionally dark; he wore no long
locks, curling “like buds of marjoram”; his breath could hardly have
exhaled the odours of flowers (S. 99), seeing that a diarist states
that his chief comfort was in the use of _tobacco_.
The lady with whom he was associated has been proved, on the other
hand, to have been, _not_ dark, but fair, _not_ married and old in
the world’s ways, but a bright young foolish girl of twenty-two, a
favourite of the Queen and the Court, over-impulsive and credulous
certainly, and probably vain and ambitious. But it was one thing, in
the lax customs of the times, to became entangled with the handsomest
and richest young bachelor of the Court, under the evident expectation
of matrimony, and another to have risked her good name in going forth
to tempt, with experienced wiles, in her even earlier years, the
somewhat well-balanced heart of a middle-aged play-actor and moralist.
What the propounders of this theory make of Shakespeare’s manliness or
morality it is hard to say. An unwarrantable stain has been thrown on
the girl’s character because Will Kemp, one of Shakespeare’s company in
1600, dedicated to her his “Nine Days Dance to Norwich.” But his lack
of the supposed intimacy is shown on the title-page by the error even
in her Christian name. The dedication was quite a natural one from the
best dancer on the stage to the best dancer at Court. In the famous
“Masque of the Nine Muses,” performed at Court at the marriage of “_the
other Lord Herbert_,” “Mistress Fitton led, and went to the Queen, and
wooed her to daunce. Her Majestie asked her what she was? ‘Affection!’
she said. ‘Affection?’ said the Queen, ‘Affection is false.’ Yet her
Majestie rose and dawnced” (“Sydney Papers,” 23rd June 1600). Now I
believe she should have said “Terpsichore,” which would account for
both the Queen’s remark and Kemp’s dedication.
We are asked to believe that all the three-years story of the Sonnets
had happened, and that Meres had had time to complete his notices of
Shakespeare based on them, and get his book passed by the censor, and
registered, _within six months_!
Finally, this theory pre-supposes that Thomas Thorpe, in 1609,
would, upon the sole ground of two common initials, have taken the
unwarrantable liberty of addressing in such familiar terms as “Mr. W.
H.” the chief nobleman of the land, who, being the eldest son of an
earl, had, from birth and baptism been designated Lord Herbert. Thorpe
would not have been so short-sighted. That he was not so, can be proved
from his dedications of Healey’s books[34] to the same nobleman in 1610
and 1616. The latter I found among Mr. W. C. Hazlitt’s “Prologues,”
and first published it _in extenso_ in relation to this controversy in
the “Shakespeare Jahrbuch,” Berlin, 1890, to show how Thorpe really
dedicated, “out of what frenzy one of my meannesse hath presumed to
commit this Sacrilege.”
No, Pembroke was impossible!
In Shakespeare’s poems, dedications, and sonnets the songs and praises
were--
To one, of one, still such and even so.--S. 105.
and that _one_ was the Earl of Southampton.[35] His life and character
alone provide all the essential desiderata; his dates alone fit into
the chronology of the sonnet sequences and give Shakespeare his natural
place in the history of literary development; his life alone gives a
natural and unstrained account of “Mr. W. H.”
We do not know the exact circumstances under which Shakespeare met the
Earl of Southampton.
Probably the young noble, in an outburst of sympathetic admiration and
gratuitous criticism, greeted him with easy patronage on the stage,
said to him, “You ought to learn to write poetry for yourself, come,
and I will show you how,” took him home, gave him some more or less
good advice on accent, manner, dress, law, literature, versification,
and courtly tastes, for which posterity is grateful to him. Kind
offices, on the one hand, were responded to by gratitude and adulation
on the other. Hardly had Shakespeare been introduced to the Earl than
he was made acquainted with the skeleton in the closet. To understand
this we must turn to the fortunes of Southampton, or rather, in the
first place, to those of his mother. For he was essentially “his
mother’s boy,” though no critics have followed out her career in
relation to Shakespeare’s environment. She was the daughter of Anthony
Browne, Viscount Montague, and Jane, daughter of the Earl of Sussex.
Her grandfather, Sir Anthony Browne, was considered the handsomest
man in the country in Henry VIII’s time, and all the family were noted
for personal beauty. She inherited a goodly share, as may be seen by
her portrait, taken in 1565, at the age of thirteen, when she married
Henry, second Earl of Southampton. This is now in the possession of
the Duke of Portland at Welbeck.[36] It probably hung on the wall of
Southampton’s home in Holborn when Shakespeare sung:
Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime.--S. 3.
Her elder son had died before his father, her second, Henry, had become
sole heir to his great house when he was eight years old. He seems
to have inherited, not only her beauty and her natural tints, as may
be seen by his fine portrait also preserved at Welbeck, but to have
resembled her in her characteristics. Cultured in taste, with a strong
appreciation of humour, refined in sentiment, religious in spirit, she
was generally able to control the self-will of her temper by a strong
sense of duty, though sometimes her hasty impulsiveness verged almost
on imprudence; faithful and self-forgetting in her affections, yet,
through her very sensitiveness, easily offended; Mary, Countess of
Southampton, does not seem to have been very happy in her marriage. Her
somewhat severe husband had conceived some unjust cause of jealousy
against her after his temper had been soured by his imprisonment in
the Tower for the matter of the Duke of Norfolk and Mary Stuart. She
wrote to her father on 21st March 1580, “My Lord sent me word it was
not his intention to keep me prisoner, only he barred me of his board
and presence ... neither could I take that but in the highest degree of
imprisonment, howsoever it pleased him otherwise to esteem it.... I
sent what I wrote _by my little boye_, but his heart was too great to
bestow reading on it, coming from me.” Possibly his misunderstanding
was the precursor of illness, for he died the following year (1581). He
left her as bare as he could, and she wrote to the Earl of Leicester,
entreating his kind offices on behalf of herself and her children,
Henry and Mary. (These letters are among the MSS. of Cottrel Dormer,
Esq., but being evidently misdated in the second appendix to “Rep. of
Roy. Hist. Com.,” I applied to the present owner, who kindly allowed
me to see them.) Her son became, of course, a royal ward, and he and
his great possessions were put under the supervision of Lord Burghley.
Camden warmly praises Southampton, and says “he spent his young years
in the study of learning and good letters, and afterwards confirmed
that study with travel and foreign observation.”
In December 1585 he was admitted to St. John’s College, Cambridge,
where he became M.A., 6th June 1589, and was incorporated of Oxford.
Before leaving College he enrolled himself a member of Gray’s Inn,
1587, where he seems to have studied as creditably as he had done at
Cambridge.
But domestic trouble was rising. Burghley was impressed with the
engaging personality, as well as the extensive possessions of young
Henry Wriothesley, and, backed by a guardian’s privilege, wanted to
secure him for his granddaughter, Lady Elizabeth Vere, the daughter
of the Earl of Oxford. The young Earl seems to have become, under the
persuasions of his mother and grandfather, to some extent, engaged. It
was a suitable marriage in every way, had but the young people loved
each other.
The poor Countess had been handicapped in the battle of life, because
her husband’s family and her own, as well as she herself, had persisted
in the expensive indulgence of exercising the rites of the Catholic
religion. She well knew the enormous advantage it would be to the
family to be known to be “connected with my Lord Burghley,” the
“searchings” and “fines” it would help her to evade, the public offices
it would secure to her son.
She urged him to complete the arrangements, his grandfather urged him,
too. Perhaps, because of the very urging, the burden of matrimonial
responsibilities became more and more distasteful. Dreams of military
glory under his admired Earl of Essex disturbed his studies in old
Gray’s Inn. Burghley began to make inquiries. He could not understand
how any young man in his senses could refuse such a splendid offer, or
even hesitate in accepting it. He suspected interlopers. He fancied
that Sir Thomas Stanhope might be trying to win him for his daughter;
but that gentleman wrote a long and very full explanatory letter to
Burghley on 10th July 1590, clearing himself of any such treacherous
presumption.
The Countess had, it is true, gone with her son to see Mr. Harvey,
who lived next door, and he had asked them to sup with him, that was
all. Lady Southampton had told him “She knew what a stay you would
be to him and to her ... in good fayth she would do her best in the
cause.... She did not find a disposition in her son to be tied as yet;
what will be hereafter time shall try, and no want shall be found on
her behalf.” Burghley seems next to have consulted Viscount Montague,
who replied on 19th September 1590 from Cowdray that he had “tried as
orderly as he could, first to acquaint his mother, and then himself
with your lordship’s letter, his lordship being with me at Cowdray....”
His daughter had told him that she did not know of her son’s fancy
having changed to any other maiden, and the youth had replied that
“Your lordship was this last winter well pleased to yield unto him a
further _respite_ of one year to ensure resolution in respect of his
young years.” I told him that the year was almost up, and said “that
it was natural your lordship should wish to have the matter about his
granddaughter settled.” The most he could get out of his grandson was
a promise that he would himself carry his answer to Lord Burghley, and
Montague arranged that he and his daughter should take him to London at
the beginning of the term.
On the 6th of October Southampton completed his seventeenth year. He
took, if he did not receive, another “year’s respite,” and on 2nd March
following, 1590-1, he wrote from Dieppe to the Earl of Essex offering
him the service of his sword. The Earl of Essex had lately married the
widow of Sir Philip Sydney, much to the Queen’s wrath, and he was in
some trouble himself. He did not risk accepting the offer of the Royal
ward.
Southampton was recalled to London, and _then_, in the April of 1591,
he probably first met, at least as a friend, that inland-bred actor,
who so strangely fascinated him, and soothed him somewhat in his regret
at being forbidden to follow Lord Essex. Someone suggested to the
Countess, or to the new poet himself on her behalf, that he, a married
man, should try to make the young lord “Suivez raison” (the family
motto of the Brownes). The most likely person to do so was the stalwart
and prudent Mr. William Harvey, who had won golden opinions from all
sorts of people at the time of the Spanish Armada in 1588, and who was
a devoted friend of the family. If we allow ourselves to realize the
likelihood of this, we find one key to the mystery of the dedication
to the sonnets lying ready to hand in a place where no one before has
looked for it. (See my article, “Who is Mr. W. H.?” “Athenæum,” 4th
August 1900.)
It was held a part of the higher culture, then, to be able to
write verses and to sing them to the lute, and, as such, doubtless
Southampton had essayed to do after the model of Thomas Watson at
least, and we have noted what had been published by that date.
Manuscript copies of the verses of the Earl of Essex, poured forth
when he wanted “to evaporate his feelings in a sonnet,” would probably
also be found in that Holborn home, when, in that “mutual improvement
society for two,” the principles of literature were discussed. The
young Earl, with his beautiful expressive eyes lit up by intellectual
fire, with his fair face, rich attire, gracious manners, ingenuous
outlook into life and philosophy, and enthusiastic inclination to help,
made a real conquest of the hungering home-sick heart of the poor
player, and such a love was kindled as had not been sung since the
days of Jonathan and David. It was because Shakespeare could feel as
well as write that he found the sonnet silver and left it golden. Mr.
Wyndham, in his splendid introduction to the “Poems of Shakespeare,”
leaves nothing unsaid concerning their aesthetic charm. Excepting the
first few I do not think the order of the sonnets at all correct. Some
critics accept the 107th as necessarily the last, and we know that
those to the lady should have been sandwiched in between those to the
youth if the date of production had been the principle of arrangement.
Within the two series also the order has evidently been disturbed
somehow.
We know that they are not all on the same level of merit; neither do
I think them all constructed with the same “intention.” The last two
evidently should come first, two forms of expressing the same idea from
foreign sources which had probably been read to the poet by the patron.
Those to the youth were evidently intended to be sent, and were sent:
the earliest ones probably through his mother. Those to the lady were
written, as Goëthe puts it, “to work off a feeling,” or to shape the
expression of “a passion.” The poet might have _sung_ them to the
lady, but he would not risk the chances of _sending them in black and
white_. When the feeling had “evaporated” they would be sent in block
to the friend, and thus be kept together, though possibly multiplied
in copies among friends, one of whom must have proved unfaithful, or
Jaggard would not have secured two by 1599.
It was doubtless with some sense of self-reproach that Shakespeare,
yielding to the family arguments, turned the engines of his new power
upon his patron, urging him to marry. Training and straining are
both too visible in the admonitory sonnets, which smell of Sidney’s
“Arcadia.” The first seven sonnets, to which I would add the eleventh
and twelfth, make a sequence by themselves. The second sequence shows
deepening affection, freer hand, more original conceptions. He bids
the youth wed to complete a harmony, to make war with Time, and to do
so “_for love of me_,” S. 10. Started as a literary experiment they
developed more and more into the expression of personal feeling, and
the advice to matrimony became subordinate, In the 13th Sonnet the poet
first addressed the youth as “love”; in the 20th and 21st he took him
as the inspiration and his muse.
A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion.--S. 20.
So is it not with me as with that muse
Stirred by a painted beauty to his verse.--S. 21.
It was something for a poet living lonely in London to have such a
wholesome and safe source of inspiration. The young noble was vain, and
there was a subtle charm in being thus sung to by one whose genius he
thought he had evoked. He listened more patiently to his poet than he
had done to his mother and friends, but of course the sonnets had no
effect in mending his misogynic mood. Their writer never expected they
would do so, probably did not even wish it. The first double set of
twenty-five was marked out by a separation which is recorded in history.
The Queen was to be at Cowdray, Viscount Montague’s country house, from
the 15th until the 22nd of August 1591, and the youth would be summoned
to his grandfather’s assistance. The Queen and Court afterwards went on
to his own house at Tichfield. Special opportunities would be certain
to be made for him on this occasion. Essex was not at Court, and Sir
Fulke Greville and others were trying to replace him by this friendly
rival. Every young nobleman of the day was trained to act in courtly
devices, and much depended on compliment with Elizabeth. Shakespeare
would very likely have given his “sweet boy” return lessons in dramatic
art, which he is nearly sure to have tried to display on this important
occasion.
During this first period of separation, as Shakespeare wrote, there
had been dawning on him the conception of a poem, by which he might at
once take his position in the world of letters, honour his friend’s
teaching, and in a somewhat allegorical fashion, after the Spenserian
“second intention,” show how the entreaties of Venus fall unheeded
upon ears intent on other music, and upon hearts filled with other
interests. I do not wish now to go into any criticism of “Venus and
Adonis,” but comparison makes it clear that the Sonnets were written
about the same time, and addressed to the same person.
Describe Adonis,[37] and the counterfeit
Is poorly imitated after you!--S. 51.