A Life of William Shakespeare Part 31

No suggestion in the sonnets of the youth's ident.i.ty with Pembroke.

The sonnets offer no internal indication that the Earl of Pembroke and Shakespeare ever saw each other. Nothing at all is deducible from the vague parallelisms that have been adduced between the earl's character and position in life and those with which the poet credited the youth of the sonnets. It may be granted that both had a mother (Sonnet iii.), that both enjoyed wealth and rank, that both were regarded by admirers as cultivated, that both were self-indulgent in their relations with women, and that both in early manhood were indisposed to marry, owing to habits of gallantry. Of one alleged point of resemblance there is no evidence.

The loveliness a.s.signed to Shakespeare's youth was not, as far as we can learn, definitely set to Pembroke's account. Francis Davison, when dedicating his 'Poetical Rhapsody' to the earl in 1602 in a very eulogistic sonnet, makes a cautiously qualified reference to the attractiveness of his person in the lines:

[His] outward shape, though it most lovely be, Doth in fair robes a fairer soul attire.

The only portraits of him that survive represent him in middle age, {414} and seem to confute the suggestion that he was reckoned handsome at any time of life; at most they confirm Anthony Wood's description of him as in person 'rather majestic than elegant.' But the point is not one of moment, and the argument neither gains nor loses, if we allow that Pembroke may, at any rate in the sight of a poetical panegyrist, have at one period reflected, like Shakespeare's youth, 'the lovely April of his mother's prime.'

But when we have reckoned up the traits that can, on any showing, be admitted to be common to both Pembroke and Shakespeare's alleged friend, they all prove to be equally indistinctive. All could be matched without difficulty in a score of youthful n.o.blemen and gentlemen of Elizabeth's Court. Direct external evidence of Shakespeare's friendly intercourse with one or other of Elizabeth's young courtiers must be produced before the sonnets' general references to the youth's beauty and grace can render the remotest a.s.sistance in establishing his ident.i.ty.

Aubrey's ignorance of any relation between Shakespeare and Pembroke.

Although it may be reckoned superfluous to adduce more arguments, negative or positive, against the theory that the Earl of Pembroke was a youthful friend of Shakespeare, it is worth noting that John Aubrey, the Wiltshire antiquary, and the biographer of most Englishmen of distinction of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was zealously researching from 1650 onwards into the careers alike of Shakespeare and of various members of the Earl of Pembroke's family--one of the chief in Wiltshire.

Aubrey rescued from oblivion many anecdotes--scandalous and otherwise--both about the third Earl of Pembroke and about Shakespeare.

Of the former he wrote in his 'Natural History of Wiltshire' (ed.

Britton, 1847), recalling the earl's relations with Ma.s.singer and many other men of letters. Of Shakespeare, Aubrey narrated much lively gossip in his 'Lives of Eminent Persons.' But neither in his account of Pembroke nor in his account of Shakespeare does he give any hint that they were at any time or in any manner acquainted or a.s.sociated with one another. Had close relations existed between them, it is impossible that all trace of them would have faded from the traditions that were current in Aubrey's time and were embodied in his writings. {415}

VIII.--THE 'WILL' SONNETS.

No one has had the hardihood to a.s.sert that the text of the sonnets gives internally any indication that the youth's name took the hapless form of 'William Herbert;' but many commentators argue that in three or four sonnets Shakespeare admits in so many words that the youth bore his own Christian name of Will, and even that the disdainful lady had among her admirers other gentlemen ent.i.tled in familiar intercourse to similar designation. These are fantastic a.s.sumptions which rest on a misconception of Shakespeare's phraseology and of the character of the conceits of the sonnets, and are solely attributable to the fanatical anxiety of the supporters of the Pembroke theory to extort, at all hazards, some sort of evidence in their favour from Shakespeare's text.

{416}

Elizabethan meanings of 'will.'

In two sonnets (cx.x.xv.-vi.)--the most artificial and 'conceited' in the collection--the poet plays somewhat enigmatically on his Christian name of 'Will,' and a similar pun has been doubtfully detected in sonnets cx.x.xiv. and cxlvii. The groundwork of the pleasantry is the ident.i.ty in form of the proper name with the common noun 'will.' This word connoted in Elizabethan English a generous variety of conceptions, of most of which it has long since been deprived. Then, as now, it was employed in the general psychological sense of volition; but it was more often specifically applied to two limited manifestations of the volition. It was the commonest of synonyms alike for 'self will' or 'stubbornness'--in which sense it still survives in 'wilful'--and for 'l.u.s.t,' or 'sensual pa.s.sion.' It also did occasional duty for its own diminutive 'wish,' for 'caprice,' for 'good-will,' and for 'free consent' (as nowadays in 'willing,' or 'willingly').

Shakespeare's uses of the word.

Shakespeare constantly used 'will' in all these significations. Iago recognised its general psychological value when he said, 'Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners.' The conduct of the 'will' is discussed after the manner of philosophy in 'Troilus and Cressida' (II. ii. 51-68). In another of Iago's sentences, 'Love is merely a l.u.s.t of the blood and a permission of the will,' light is shed on the process by which the word came to be specifically applied to sensual desire. The last is a favourite sense with Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Angelo and Isabella, in 'Measure for Measure,' are at one in attributing their conflict to the former's 'will.' The self-indulgent Bertram, in 'All's Well,' 'fleshes his "will" in the spoil of a gentlewoman's honour.' In 'Lear' (IV. vi. 279) Regan's heartless plot to seduce her brother-in-law is a.s.signed to 'the undistinguished s.p.a.ce'--the boundless range--'of woman's will.' Similarly, Sir Philip Sidney apostrophised l.u.s.t as 'thou web of will.' Thomas Lodge, in 'Phillis' (Sonnet xi.), warns lovers of the ruin that menaces all who 'guide their course by will.' Nicholas Breton's fantastic romance of 1599, ent.i.tled 'The Will of Wit, Wit's Will or Will's Wit, Chuse you whether,' is especially rich in like ill.u.s.trations. Breton brings into marked prominence the ant.i.thesis which was familiar in his day between 'will' in its sensual meaning, and 'wit,' the Elizabethan synonym for reason or cognition. 'A song between Wit and Will' opens thus:

_Wit_: What art thou, Will? _Will_: A babe of nature's brood,

_Wit_: Who was thy sire? _Will_: Sweet l.u.s.t, as lovers say.

_Wit_: Thy mother who? _Will_: Wild l.u.s.ty wanton blood.

_Wit_: When wast thou born? _Will_: In merry month of May.

_Wit_: And where brought up? _Will_: In school of little skill.

_Wit_: What learn'dst thou there? _Will_: Love is my lesson still.

Of the use of the word in the sense of stubbornness or self-will Roger Ascham gives a good instance in his 'Scholemaster,' (1570), where he recommends that such a vice in children as 'will,' which he places in the category of lying, sloth, and disobedience, should be 'with sharp chastis.e.m.e.nt daily cut away.' {418a} 'A woman will have her will' was, among Elizabethan wags, an exceptionally popular proverbial phrase, the point of which revolved about the equivocal meaning of the last word.

The phrase supplied the t.i.tle of 'a pleasant comedy,' by William Haughton, which--from 1597 onwards--held the stage for the unusually prolonged period of forty years. 'Women, because they cannot have their wills when they dye, they will have their wills while they live,' was a current witticism which the barrister Manningham deemed worthy of record in his 'Diary' in 1602. {418b}

Shakespeare's puns on the word.

It was not only in the sonnets that Shakespeare--almost invariably with a glance at its sensual significance--rang the changes on this many-faced verbal token. In his earliest play, 'Love's Labour's Lost' (II. i.

97-101), after the princess has tauntingly a.s.sured the King of Navarre that he will break his vow to avoid women's society, the king replies, 'Not for the world, fair madam, by my _will_' (_i.e._ willingly). The princess retorts 'Why _will_ (_i.e._ sensual desire) shall break it (_i.e._ the vow), _will_ and nothing else.' In 'Much Ado' (V. iv. 26 seq.), when Bened.i.c.k, anxious to marry Beatrice, is asked by the lady's uncle 'What's your will?' he playfully lingers on the word in his answer.

As for his 'will,' his 'will' is that the uncle's 'goodwill may stand with his' and Beatrice's 'will'--in other words that the uncle may consent to their union. Slender and Anne Page vary the tame sport when the former misinterprets the young lady's 'What is your will?' into an inquiry into the testamentary disposition of his property. To what depth of vapidity Shakespeare and contemporary punsters could sink is nowhere better ill.u.s.trated than in the favour they bestowed on efforts to extract amus.e.m.e.nt from the parities and disparities of form and meaning subsisting between the words 'will' and 'wish,' the latter being in vernacular use as a diminutive of the former. Twice in the 'Two Gentlemen of Verona' (I. iii. 63 and IV. ii. 96) Shakespeare almost strives to invest with the flavour of epigram the unpretending announcement that one interlocutor's 'wish' is in harmony with another interlocutor's 'will.'

It is in this vein of pleasantry--'will' and 'wish' are identically contrasted in Sonnet cx.x.xv.--that Shakespeare, to the confusion of modern readers, makes play with the word 'will' in the sonnets, and especially in the two sonnets (cx.x.xv.-vi.) which alone speciously justify the delusion that the lady is courted by two, or more than two, lovers of the name of Will.

Arbitrary and irregular use of italics by Elizabethan and Jacobean printers.

One of the chief arguments advanced in favour of this interpretation is that the word 'will' in these sonnets is frequently italicised in the original edition. But this has little or no bearing on the argument.

The corrector of the press recognised that Sonnets cx.x.xv. and cx.x.xvi.

largely turned upon a simple pun between the writer's name of 'Will' and the lady's 'will.' That fact, and no other, he indicated very roughly by occasionally italicising the crucial word. Typography at the time followed no firmly fixed rules, and, although 'will' figures in a more or less punning sense nineteen times in these sonnets, the printer bestowed on the word the distinction of italics in only ten instances, and those were selected arbitrarily. The italics indicate the obvious equivoque, and indicate it imperfectly. That is the utmost that can be laid to their credit. They give no hint of the far more complicated punning that is alleged by those who believe that 'Will' is used now as the name of the writer, and now as that of one or more of the rival suitors. In each of the two remaining sonnets that have been forced into the service of the theory, Nos. cx.x.xiv. and cxliii., 'will' occurs once only; it alone is italicised in the second sonnet in the original edition, and there, in my opinion, arbitrarily and without just cause. {419}

The conceits of sonnets cx.x.xv-vi. interpreted.

The general intention of the complex conceits of Sonnets cx.x.xv. and cx.x.xvi. becomes obvious when we bear in mind that in them Shakespeare exploits to the uttermost the verbal coincidences which are inherent in the Elizabethan word 'will.' 'Will' is the Christian name of the enslaved writer; 'will' is the sentiment with which the lady inspires her worshippers; and 'will' designates stubbornness as well as sensual desire. These two characteristics, according to the poet's reiterated testimony, are the distinguishing marks of the lady's disposition. He often dwells elsewhere on her 'proud heart' or 'foul pride,' and her sensuality or 'foul faults.' These are her 'wills,' and they make up her being. In crediting the lady with such const.i.tution Shakespeare was not recording any definite observation or experience of his own, but was following, as was his custom, the conventional descriptions of the disdainful mistress common to all contemporary collections of sonnets.

Barnabe Barnes asks the lady celebrated in his sonnets, from whose 'proud disdainfulness' he suffered,

Why dost thou my delights delay, And with thy cross unkindness kills (_sic_) Mine heart, bound martyr to thy wills?

Barnes answers his question in the next lines:

But women will have their own wills, Since what she lists her heart fulfils. {420}

Similar pa.s.sages abound in Elizabethan sonnets, but certain verbal similarities give good ground for regarding Shakespeare's 'will' sonnets as deliberate adaptations--doubtless with satiric purpose--of Barnes's stereotyped reflections on women's obduracy. The form and the constant repet.i.tion of the word 'will' in these two sonnets of Shakespeare also seem to imitate derisively the same rival's Sonnets lxxii. and lxxiii. in which Barnes puts the words 'grace' and 'graces' through much the same evolutions as Shakespeare puts the words 'will' and 'wills' in the Sonnets cx.x.xv. and cx.x.xvi. {421a}

Shakespeare's 'Sonnet' cx.x.xv. runs:

Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will, And will to boot, and will in over-plus; More than enough am I that vex thee still, To thy sweet will making addition thus.

Wilt thou, whose will is large and s.p.a.cious, {420b} Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?

Shall will in others seem right gracious, And in my will no fair acceptance shine?

The sea, all water, yet receives rain still, And in abundance addeth to his store; So thou, being rich in will, add to thy will One will of mine, to make thy large will more.

Let no unkind no fair beseechers kill; Think all but one, and me in that one--Will.

Sonnet cx.x.xv.