A Life of William Shakespeare Part 7

His choice of patron for this, like all his volumes, was dictated solely by his mercantile interests. He was under no inducement and in no position to take into consideration the affairs of Shakespeare's private life. Shakespeare, through all but the earliest stages of his career, belonged socially to a world that was cut off by impa.s.sable barriers from that in which Thorpe pursued his calling. It was wholly outside Thorpe's aims in life to seek to mystify his customers by investing a dedication with any cryptic significance.

No peer of the day, moreover, bore a name which could be represented by the initials 'Mr. W. H.' Shakespeare was never on terms of intimacy (although the contrary has often been recklessly a.s.sumed) with William, third Earl of Pembroke, when a youth. {94} But were complete proofs of the acquaintanceship forthcoming, they would throw no light on Thorpe's 'Mr. W. H.' The Earl of Pembroke was, from his birth to the date of his succession to the earldom in 1601, known by the courtesy t.i.tle of Lord Herbert and by no other name, and he could not have been designated at any period of his life by the symbols 'Mr. W. H.' In 1609 Pembroke was a high officer of state, and numerous books were dedicated to him in all the splendour of his many t.i.tles. Star-Chamber penalties would have been exacted of any publisher or author who denied him in print his t.i.tular distinctions. Thorpe had occasion to dedicate two books to the earl in later years, and he there showed not merely that he was fully acquainted with the compulsory etiquette, but that his sycophantic temperament rendered him only eager to improve on the conventional formulas of servility. Any further consideration of Thorpe's address to 'Mr. W. H.'

belongs to the biographies of Thorpe and his friend; it lies outside the scope of Shakespeare's biography. {95a}

The form of Shakespeare's Sonnets.

Shakespeare's 'Sonnets' ignore the somewhat complex scheme of rhyme adopted by Petrarch, whom the Elizabethan sonnetteers, like the French sonnetteers of the sixteenth century, recognised to be in most respects their master. Following the example originally set by Surrey and Wyatt, and generally pursued by Shakespeare's contemporaries, his sonnets aim at far greater metrical simplicity than the Italian or the French. They consist of three decasyllabic quatrains with a concluding couplet, and the quatrains rhyme alternately. {95b} A single sonnet does not always form an independent poem. As in the French and Italian sonnets of the period, and in those of Spenser, Sidney, Daniel, and Drayton, the same train of thought is at times pursued continuously through two or more.

The collection of Shakespeare's 154 sonnets thus presents the appearance of an extended series of independent poems, many in a varying number of fourteen-line stanzas. The longest sequence (i.-xvii.) numbers seventeen sonnets, and in Thorpe's edition opens the volume.

Want of continuity. The two 'groups.'

It is unlikely that the order in which the poems were printed follows the order in which they were written. Fantastic endeavours have been made to detect in the original arrangement of the poems a closely connected narrative, but the thread is on any showing constantly interrupted. {96} It is usual to divide the sonnets into two groups, and to represent that all those numbered i.-cxxvi. by Thorpe were addressed to a young man, and all those numbered cxxvii.-cliv. were addressed to a woman. This division cannot be literally justified. In the first group some eighty of the sonnets can be proved to be addressed to a man by the use of the masculine p.r.o.noun or some other unequivocal sign; but among the remaining forty there is no clear indication of the kind. Many of these forty are meditative soliloquies which address no person at all (cf. cv. cxvi.

cxix. cxxi.) A few invoke abstractions like Death (lxvi.) or Time (cxxiii.), or 'benefit of ill' (cxix.) The twelve-lined poem (cxxvi.), the last of the first 'group,' does little more than sound a variation on the conventional poetic invocations of Cupid or Love personified as a boy. {97} And there is no valid objection to the a.s.sumption that the poet inscribed the rest of these forty sonnets to a woman (cf. xxi. xlvi.

xlvii.) Similarly, the sonnets in the second 'group' (cxxvii.-cliv.) have no uniform superscription. Six invoke no person at all. No.

cxxviii. is an overstrained compliment on a lady playing on the virginals. No. cxxix. is a metaphysical disquisition on l.u.s.t. No. cxlv.

is a playful lyric in octosyllabics, like Lyly's song of 'Cupid and Campaspe,' and its tone has close affinity to that and other of Lyly's songs. No. cxlvi. invokes the soul of man. Nos. cliii. and cliv.

soliloquise on an ancient Greek apologue on the force of Cupid's fire.

{98}

Main topics of the first 'group.'

The choice and succession of topics in each 'group' give to neither genuine cohesion. In the first 'group' the long opening sequence (i.-xvii.) forms the poet's appeal to a young man to marry so that his youth and beauty may survive in children. There is almost a contradiction in terms between the poet's handling of that topic and his emphatic boast in the two following sonnets (xviii.-xix.) that his verse alone is fully equal to the task of immortalising his friend's youth and accomplishments. The same a.s.severation is repeated in many later sonnets (cf. lv. lx. lxiii. lxxiv. lx.x.xi. ci. cvii.) These alternate with conventional adulation of the beauty of the object of the poet's affections (cf. xxi. liii. lxviii.) and descriptions of the effects of absence in intensifying devotion (cf. xlviii. l. cxiii.) There are many reflections on the nocturnal torments of a lover (cf. xxvii. xxviii.

xliii. lxi.) and on his blindness to the beauty of spring or summer when he is separated from his love (cf. xcvii. xcviii.) At times a youth is rebuked for sensual indulgences; he has sought and won the favour of the poet's mistress in the poet's absence, but the poet is forgiving (x.x.xii.-x.x.xv. xl.-xlii. lxix. xcv.-xcvi.) In Sonnet lxx. the young man whom the poet addresses is credited with a different disposition and experience:

And thou present'st a pure unstained prime.

Thou hast pa.s.s'd by the ambush of young days, Either not a.s.sail'd, or victor being charg'd!

At times melancholy overwhelms the writer: he despairs of the corruptions of the age (lxvi.), reproaches himself with carnal sin (cxix.), declares himself weary of his profession of acting (cxi. cxii.), and foretells his approaching death (lxxi.-lxxiv.) Throughout are dispersed obsequious addresses to the youth in his capacity of sole patron of the poet's verse (cf. xxiii. x.x.xvii. c. ci. ciii. civ.) But in one sequence the friend is sorrowfully reproved for bestowing his patronage on rival poets (lxxviii.-lx.x.xvi.) In three sonnets near the close of the first group in the original edition, the writer gives varied a.s.surances of his constancy in love or friendship which apply indifferently to man or woman (cf.

cxxii. cxxiv. cxxv.)

Main topics of the second 'group.'

In two sonnets of the second 'group' (cxxvi.-clii.) the poet compliments his mistress on her black complexion and raven-black hair and eyes. In twelve sonnets he hotly denounces his 'dark' mistress for her proud disdain of his affection, and for her manifold infidelities with other men. Apparently continuing a theme of the first 'group,' the poet rebukes the woman, whom he addresses, for having beguiled his friend to yield himself to her seductions (cx.x.xiii.-cx.x.xvi.) Elsewhere he makes satiric reflections on the extravagant compliments paid to the fair s.e.x by other sonnetteers (No. cx.x.x.) or lightly quibbles on his name of 'Will' (cx.x.x.-vi.) In tone and subject-matter numerous sonnets in the second as in the first 'group' lack visible sign of coherence with those they immediately precede or follow.

It is not merely a close study of the text that confutes the theory, for which recent writers have fought hard, of a logical continuity in Thorpe's arrangement of the poems in 1609. There remains the historic fact that readers and publishers of the seventeenth century acknowledged no sort of significance in the order in which the poems first saw the light. When the sonnets were printed for a second time in 1640--thirty-one years after their first appearance--they were presented in a completely different order. The short descriptive t.i.tles which were then supplied to single sonnets or to short sequences proved that the collection was regarded as a disconnected series of occasional poems in more or less amorous vein.

Lack of genuine sentiment in Elizabethan sonnets. Their dependence on French and Italian models.

In whatever order Shakespeare's sonnets be studied, the claim that has been advanced in their behalf to rank as autobiographical doc.u.ments can only be accepted with many qualifications. Elizabethan sonnets were commonly the artificial products of the poet's fancy. A strain of personal emotion is occasionally discernible in a detached effort, and is vaguely traceable in a few sequences; but autobiographical confessions were very rarely the stuff of which the Elizabethan sonnet was made. The typical collection of Elizabethan sonnets was a mosaic of plagiarisms, a medley of imitative studies. Echoes of the French or of the Italian sonnetteers, with their Platonic idealism, are usually the dominant notes. The echoes often have a musical quality peculiar to themselves.

Daniel's fine sonnet (xlix.) on 'Care-charmer, sleep,' although directly inspired by the French, breathes a finer melody than the sonnet of Pierre de Brach {101a} apostrophising 'le sommeil cha.s.se-soin' (in the collection ent.i.tled 'Les Amours d'Aymee'), or the sonnet of Philippe Desportes invoking 'Sommeil, paisible fils de la nuit solitaire' (in the collection ent.i.tled 'Amours d'Hippolyte'). {101b} But, throughout Elizabethan sonnet literature, the heavy debt to Italian and French effort is unmistakable. {101c} Spenser, in 1569, at the outset of his literary career, avowedly translated numerous sonnets from Du Bellay and from Petrarch, and his friend Gabriel Harvey bestowed on him the t.i.tle of 'an English Petrarch'--the highest praise that the critic conceived it possible to bestow on an English sonnetteer. {101d} Thomas Watson in 1582, in his collection of metrically irregular sonnets which he ent.i.tled '[Greek text], or A Pa.s.sionate Century of Love,' prefaced each poem, which he termed a 'pa.s.sion,' with a prose note of its origin and intention. Watson frankly informed his readers that one 'pa.s.sion' was 'wholly translated out of Petrarch;' that in another pa.s.sion 'he did very busily imitate and augment a certain ode of Ronsard;' while 'the sense or matter of "a third" was taken out of Serafino in his "Strambotti."' In every case Watson gave the exact reference to his foreign original, and frequently appended a quotation. {103a} Drayton in 1594, in the dedicatory sonnet of his collection of sonnets ent.i.tled 'Idea,' declared that it was 'a fault too common in this latter time' 'to filch from Desportes or from Petrarch's pen.' {103b} Lodge did not acknowledge his borrowings more specifically than his colleagues, but he made a plain profession of indebtedness to Desportes when he wrote: 'Few men are able to second the sweet conceits of Philippe Desportes, whose poetical writings are ordinarily in everybody's hand.' {103c} Giles Fletcher, who in his collection of sonnets called 'Licia' (1593) simulated the varying moods of a lover under the sway of a great pa.s.sion as successfully as most of his rivals, stated on his t.i.tle-page that his poems were all written in 'imitation of the best Latin poets and others.' Very many of the love-sonnets in the series of sixty-eight penned ten years later by William Drummond of Hawthornden have been traced to their sources in the Italian sonnets not merely of Petrarch, but of the sixteenth-century poets Guarini, Bembo, Giovanni Battista Marino, Ta.s.so, and Sannazzaro.

{104a} The Elizabethans usually gave the fict.i.tious mistresses after whom their volumes of sonnets were called the names that had recently served the like purpose in France. Daniel followed Maurice Seve {104b} in christening his collection 'Delia;' Constable followed Desportes in christening his collection 'Diana;' while Drayton not only applied to his sonnets on his t.i.tle-page in 1594 the French term 'amours,' but bestowed on his imaginary heroine the t.i.tle of Idea, which seems to have been the invention of Claude de Pontoux, {104c} although it was employed by other French contemporaries.

Sonnetteers' admission of insincerity.

With good reason Sir Philip Sidney warned the public that 'no inward touch' was to be expected from sonnetteers of his day, whom he describes as

'[Men] that do dictionary's method bring Into their rhymes running in rattling rows; [Men] that poor Petrarch's long deceased woes With newborn sighs and denizened wit do sing.'

Sidney unconvincingly claimed greater sincerity for his own experiments.

But 'even amorous sonnets in the gallantest and sweetest civil vein,'

wrote Gabriel Harvey in 'Pierces Supererogation' in 1593, 'are but dainties of a pleasurable wit.' Drayton's sonnets more nearly approached Shakespeare's in quality than those of any contemporary. Yet Drayton told the readers of his collection ent.i.tled 'Idea' {105} (after the French) that if any sought genuine pa.s.sion in them, they had better go elsewhere. 'In all humours _sportively_ he ranged,' he declared. Giles Fletcher, in 1593, introduced his collection of imitative sonnets ent.i.tled 'Licia, or Poems of Love,' with the warning, 'Now in that I have written love sonnets, if any man measure my affection by my style, let him say I am in love. . . . Here, take this by the way . . . a man may write of love and not be in love, as well as of husbandry and not go to the plough, or of witches and be none, or of holiness and be profane.'

{106a}

Contemporary censure of sonnetteers' false sentiment. 'Gulling Sonnets.'

The dissemination of false sentiment by the sonnetteers, and their monotonous and mechanical treatment of 'the pangs of despised love' or the joys of requited affection, did not escape the censure of contemporary criticism. The air soon rang with sarcastic protests from the most respected writers of the day. In early life Gabriel Harvey wittily parodied the mingling of adulation and vituperation in the conventional sonnet-sequence in his 'Amorous Odious Sonnet int.i.tuled The Student's Loove or Hatrid.' {106b} Chapman in 1595, in a series of sonnets ent.i.tled 'A Coronet for his mistress Philosophy,' appealed to his literary comrades to abandon 'the painted cabinet' of the love-sonnet for a coffer of genuine worth. But the most resolute of the censors of the sonnetteering vogue was the poet and lawyer, Sir John Davies. In a sonnet addressed about 1596 to his friend, Sir Anthony Cooke (the patron of Drayton's 'Idea'), he inveighed against the 'b.a.s.t.a.r.d sonnets' which 'base rhymers' 'daily' begot 'to their own shames and poetry's disgrace.'

In his anxiety to stamp out the folly he wrote and circulated in ma.n.u.script a specimen series of nine 'gulling sonnets' or parodies of the conventional efforts. {107a} Even Shakespeare does not seem to have escaped Davies's condemnation. Sir John is especially severe on the sonnetteers who handled conceits based on legal technicalities, and his eighth 'gulling sonnet,' in which he ridicules the application of law terms to affairs of the heart, may well have been suggested by Shakespeare's legal phraseology in his Sonnets lx.x.xvii. and cxxiv.; {107b} while Davies's Sonnet ix., beginning:

'To love, my lord, I do knight's service owe'

must have parodied Shakespeare's Sonnet xxvi., beginning:

'Lord of my love, to whom in va.s.salage,' etc. {107c}

Shakespeare's scornful allusion to sonnets in his plays.

Echoes of the critical hostility are heard, it is curious to note, in nearly all the references that Shakespeare himself makes to sonnetteering in his plays. 'Tush, none but minstrels like of sonnetting,' exclaims Biron in 'Love's Labour's Lost' (IV. iii. 158). In the 'Two Gentlemen of Verona' (III. ii. 68 seq.) there is a satiric touch in the recipe for the conventional love-sonnet which Proteus offers the amorous Duke:

You must lay lime to tangle her desires By wailful sonnets whose composed rime Should be full fraught with serviceable vows . . .

Say that upon the altar of her beauty You sacrifice your sighs, your tears, your heart.

Mercutio treats Elizabethan sonnetteers even less respectfully when alluding to them in his flouts at Romeo: 'Now is he for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in: Laura, to his lady, was but a kitchen-wench. Marry, she had a better love to be-rhyme her.' {108} In later plays Shakespeare's disdain of the sonnet is still more p.r.o.nounced. In 'Henry V' (III. vii. 33 et seq.) the Dauphin, after bestowing ridiculously magniloquent commendation on his charger, remarks, 'I once writ a sonnet in his praise, and begun thus: "Wonder of nature!"' The Duke of Orleans retorts: 'I have heard a sonnet begin so to one's mistress.' The Dauphin replies: 'Then did they imitate that which I composed to my courser; for my horse is my mistress.' In 'Much Ado about Nothing' (V. ii. 4-7) Margaret, Hero's waiting-woman, mockingly asks Bened.i.c.k to 'write her a sonnet in praise of her beauty.' Bened.i.c.k jestingly promises one so 'in high a style that no man living shall come over it.' Subsequently (V.

iv. 87) Bened.i.c.k is convicted, to the amus.e.m.e.nt of his friends, of penning 'a halting sonnet of his own pure brain' in praise of Beatrice.