A Life of William Shakespeare Part 10

My saucy bark inferior far to his . . .

Your shallowest help will hold me up afloat,

he seems to write with an eye on Barnes's identical choice of metaphor:

My fancy's ship tossed here and there by these [_sc._ sorrow's floods]

Still floats in danger ranging to and fro.

How fears my thoughts' swift pinnace thine hard rock! {134b}

Other theories as to the rival's ident.i.ty.

Gervase Markham is equally emphatic in his sonnet to Southampton on the potent influence of his patron's 'eyes,' which, he says, crown 'the most victorious pen'--a possible reference to Shakespeare. Nash's poetic praises of the Earl are no less enthusiastic, and are of a finer literary temper than Markham's. But Shakespeare's description of his rival's literary work fits far less closely the verse of Markham and Nash than the verse of their fellow aspirant Barnes.

Many critics argue that the numbing fear of his rival's genius and of its influence on his patron to which Shakespeare confessed in the sonnets was more likely to be evoked by the work of George Chapman than by that of any other contemporary poet. But Chapman had produced no conspicuously 'great verse' till he began his translation of Homer in 1598; and although he appended in 1610 to a complete edition of his translation a sonnet to Southampton, it was couched in the coldest terms of formality, and it was one of a series of sixteen sonnets each addressed to a distinguished n.o.bleman with whom the writer implies that he had no previous relations. {135} Drayton, Ben Jonson, and Marston have also been identified by various critics with 'the rival poet,' but none of these shared Southampton's bounty, nor are the terms which Shakespeare applies to his rival's verse specially applicable to the productions of any of them.

Sonnets of friendship.

Many besides the 'dedicatory' sonnets are addressed to a handsome youth of wealth and rank, for whom the poet avows 'love,' in the Elizabethan sense of friendship. {136} Although no specific reference is made outside the twenty 'dedicatory' sonnets to the youth as a literary patron, and the clues to his ident.i.ty are elsewhere vaguer, there is good ground for the conclusion that the sonnets of disinterested love or friendship also have Southampton for their subject. The sincerity of the poet's sentiment is often open to doubt in these poems, but they seem to ill.u.s.trate a real intimacy subsisting between Shakespeare and a young Maecenas.

Extravagances of literary compliment.

Extravagant compliment--'gross painting' Shakespeare calls it--was more conspicuous in the intercourse of patron and client during the last years of Elizabeth's reign than in any other epoch. For this result the sovereign herself was in part responsible. Contemporary schemes of literary compliment seemed infected by the feigned accents of amorous pa.s.sion and false rhapsodies on her physical beauty with which men of letters servilely sought to satisfy the old Queen's incurable greed of flattery. {137} Sir Philip Sidney described with admirable point the adulatory excesses to which less exalted patrons were habituated by literary dependents. He gave the warning that as soon as a man showed interest in poetry or its producers, poets straightway p.r.o.nounced him 'to be most fair, most rich, most wise, most all.' 'You shall dwell upon superlatives . . . Your soule shall be placed with Dante's Beatrice.'

{138a} The warmth of colouring which distinguishes many of the sonnets that Shakespeare, under the guise of disinterested friendship, addressed to the youth can be matched at nearly all points in the adulation that patrons were in the habit of receiving from literary dependents in the style that Sidney described. {138b}

Patrons habitually addressed in affectionate terms.

Shakespeare a.s.sured his friend that he could never grow old (civ.), that the finest types of beauty and chivalry in mediaeval romance lived again in him (cvi.), that absence from him was misery, and that his affection for him was unalterable. Hundreds of poets openly gave the like a.s.surances to their patrons. Southampton was only one of a crowd of Maecenases whose panegyrists, writing without concealment in their own names, credited them with every perfection of mind and body, and 'placed them,' in Sidney's apt phrase, 'with Dante's "Beatrice."'

Ill.u.s.trations of the practice abound. Matthew Roydon wrote of his patron, Sir Philip Sidney:

His personage seemed most divine, A thousand graces one might count Upon his lovely cheerful eyne.

To heare him speak and sweetly smile You were in Paradise the while.

Edmund Spenser in a fine sonnet told his patron, Admiral Lord Charles Howard, that 'his good personage and n.o.ble deeds' made him the pattern to the present age of the old heroes of whom 'the antique poets' were 'wont so much to sing.' This compliment, which Shakespeare turns to splendid account in Sonnet cvi., recurs constantly in contemporary sonnets of adulation. {140a} Ben Jonson apostrophised the Earl of Desmond as 'my best-best lov'd.' Campion told Lord Walden, the Earl of Suffolk's undistinguished heir, that although his muse sought to express his love, 'the admired virtues' of the patron's youth

Bred such despairing to his daunted Muse That it could scarcely utter naked truth. {140b}

Dr. John Donne includes among his 'Verse Letters' to patrons and patronesses several sonnets of similar temper, one of which, acknowledging a letter of news from a patron abroad, concludes thus:

And now thy alms is given, thy letter's read, The body risen again, the which was dead, And thy poor starveling bountifully fed.

After this banquet my soul doth say grace, And praise thee for it and zealously embrace Thy love, though I think thy love in this case To be as gluttons', which say 'midst their meat They love that best of which they most do eat. {141}

The tone of yearning for a man's affection is sounded by Donne and Campion almost as plaintively in their sonnets to patrons as it was sounded by Shakespeare. There is nothing, therefore, in the vocabulary of affection which Shakespeare employed in his sonnets of friendship to conflict with the theory that they were inscribed to a literary patron with whom his intimacy was of the kind normally subsisting at the time between literary clients and their patrons.

Direct references to Southampton in the sonnets of friendship.

We know Shakespeare had only one literary patron, the Earl of Southampton, and the view that that n.o.bleman is the hero of the sonnets of 'friendship' is strongly corroborated by such definite details as can be deduced from the vague eulogies in those poems of the youth's gifts and graces. Every compliment, in fact, paid by Shakespeare to the youth, whether it be vaguely or definitely phrased, applies to Southampton without the least straining of the words. In real life beauty, birth, wealth, and wit sat 'crowned' in the Earl, whom poets acclaimed the handsomest of Elizabethan courtiers, as plainly as in the hero of the poet's verse. Southampton has left in his correspondence ample proofs of his literary learning and taste, and, like the hero of the sonnets, was 'as fair in knowledge as in hue.' The opening sequence of seventeen sonnets, in which a youth of rank and wealth is admonished to marry and beget a son so that 'his fair house' may not fall into decay, can only have been addressed to a young peer like Southampton, who was as yet unmarried, had vast possessions, and was the sole male representative of his family. The sonnetteer's exclamation, 'You had a father, let your son say so,' had pertinence to Southampton at any period between his father's death in his boyhood and the close of his bachelorhood in 1598.

To no other peer of the day are the words exactly applicable. The 'lascivious comment' on his 'wanton sport' which pursues the young friend through the sonnets, and is so adroitly contrived as to add point to the picture of his fascinating youth and beauty, obviously a.s.sociates itself with the reputation for sensual indulgence that Southampton acquired both at Court and, according to Nash, among men of letters. {142}

His youthfulness.

There is no force in the objection that the young man of the sonnets of 'friendship' must have been another than Southampton because the terms in which he is often addressed imply extreme youth. In 1594, a date to which I refer most of the sonnets Southampton was barely twenty-one, and the young man had obviously reached manhood. In Sonnet civ. Shakespeare notes that the first meeting between him and his friend took place three years before that poem was written, so that, if the words are to be taken literally, the poet may have at times embodied reminiscences of Southampton when he was only seventeen or eighteen. {143a} But Shakespeare, already worn in worldly experience, pa.s.sed his thirtieth birthday in 1594, and he probably tended, when on the threshold of middle life, to exaggerate the youthfulness of the n.o.bleman almost ten years his junior, who even later impressed his acquaintances by his boyish appearance and disposition. {143b} 'Young' was the epithet invariably applied to Southampton by all who knew anything of him even when he was twenty-eight. In 1601 Sir Robert Cecil referred to him as the 'poor young Earl.'

The evidence of portraits.

But the most striking evidence of the ident.i.ty of the youth of the sonnets of 'friendship' with Southampton is found in the likeness of feature and complexion which characterises the poet's description of the youth's outward appearance and the extant pictures of Southampton as a young man. Shakespeare's many references to his youth's 'painted counterfeit' (xvi., xxiv., xlvii., lxvii.) suggest that his hero often sat for his portrait. Southampton's countenance survives in probably more canvases than that of any of his contemporaries. At least fourteen extant portraits have been identified on good authority--nine paintings, three miniatures (two by Peter Oliver and one by Isaac Oliver), and two contemporary prints. {144} Most of these, it is true, portray their subject in middle age, when the roses of youth had faded, and they contribute nothing to the present argument. But the two portraits that are now at Welbeck, the property of the Duke of Portland, give all the information that can be desired of Southampton's aspect 'in his youthful morn.' {145} One of these pictures represents the Earl at twenty-one, and the other at twenty-five or twenty-six. The earlier portrait, which is reproduced on the opposite page, shows a young man resplendently attired. His doublet is of white satin; a broad collar, edged with lace, half covers a pointed gorget of red leather, embroidered with silver thread; the white trunks and knee-breeches are laced with gold; the sword-belt, embroidered in red and gold, is decorated at intervals with white silk bows; the hilt of the rapier is overlaid with gold; purple garters, embroidered in silver thread, fasten the white stockings below the knee. Light body armour, richly damascened, lies on the ground to the right of the figure; and a white-plumed helmet stands to the left on a table covered with a cloth of purple velvet embroidered in gold. Such gorgeous raiment suggests that its wearer bestowed much attention on his personal equipment. But the head is more interesting than the body. The eyes are blue, the cheeks pink, the complexion clear, and the expression sedate; rings are in the ears; beard and moustache are at an incipient stage, and are of the same, bright auburn hue as the hair in a picture of Southampton's mother that is also at Welbeck. {146a} But, however scanty is the down on the youth's cheek, the hair on his head is luxuriant. It is worn very long, and falls over and below the shoulder. The colour is now of walnut, but was originally of lighter tint.

[Picture: Henry Wriothesley]

The portrait depicting Southampton five or six years later shows him in prison, to which he was committed after his secret marriage in 1598. A cat and a book in a jewelled binding are on a desk at his right hand.

Here the hair falls over both his shoulders in even greater profusion, and is distinctly blonde. The beard and thin upturned moustache are of brighter auburn and fuller than before, although still slight. The blue eyes and colouring of the cheeks show signs of ill-health, but differ little from those features in the earlier portrait.

From either of the two Welbeck portraits of Southampton might Shakespeare have drawn his picture of the youth in the Sonnets. Many times does he tell us that the youth is fair in complexion, and that his eyes are fair.

In Sonnet lxviii., when he points to the youth's face as a map of what beauty was 'without all ornament, itself and true'--before fashion sanctioned the use of artificial 'golden tresses'--there can be little doubt that he had in mind the wealth of locks that fell about Southampton's neck. {146b}

Sonnet cvii. the last of the series.

A few only of the sonnets that Shakespeare addressed to the youth can be allotted to a date subsequent to 1594; only two bear on the surface signs of a later composition. In Sonnet lxx. the poet no longer credits his hero with juvenile wantonness, but with a 'pure, unstained prime,' which has 'pa.s.sed by the ambush of young days.' Sonnet cvii., apparently the last of the series, was penned almost a decade after the ma.s.s of its companions, for it makes references that cannot be mistaken to three events that took place in 1603--to Queen Elizabeth's death, to the accession of James I, and to the release of the Earl of Southampton, who had been in prison since he was convicted in 1601 of complicity in the rebellion of the Earl of Ess.e.x. The first two events are thus described:

The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured And the sad augurs mock their own presage; Incertainties now crown themselves a.s.sured And peace proclaims olives of endless age.

Allusion to Elizabeth's death.