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.

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 pronoun 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 assumption 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 lust.  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 asseveration is repeated in many later sonnets (cf. lv. lx. lxiii. lxxiv. lxxxi. 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 (xxxii.-xxxv. xl.-xlii. lxix. xcv.-xcvi.)  In Sonnet lxx. the young man whom the poet addresses is credited with a different disposition and experience:

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 (cxxxiii.-cxxxvi.)  Elsewhere he makes satiric reflections on the extravagant compliments paid to the fair sex by other sonnetteers (No. cxxx.) or lightly quibbles on his name of ‘Will’ (cxxx.-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.

In whatever order Shakespeare’s sonnets be studied, the claim that has been advanced in their behalf to rank as autobiographical documents 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 chasse-soin’ (in the collection entitled ‘Les Amours d’Aymée’), or the sonnet of Philippe Desportes invoking ‘Sommeil, paisible fils de la nuit solitaire’ (in the collection entitled ‘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 title 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 entitled ‘ΈΚΑΤΟΜΠΑΘΙΑ, or A Passionate Century of Love,’ prefaced each poem, which he termed a ‘passion,’ with a prose note of its origin and intention.  Watson frankly informed his readers that one ‘passion’ was ‘wholly translated out of Petrarch;’ that in another passion ‘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 entitled ‘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 passion as successfully as most of his rivals, stated on his title-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, Tasso, and Sannazzaro. [104a]  The Elizabethans usually gave the fictitious mistresses after whom their volumes of sonnets were called the names that had recently served the like purpose in France.  Daniel followed Maurice Sève [104b] in christening his collection ‘Delia;’ Constable followed Desportes in christening his collection ‘Diana;’ while Drayton not only applied to his sonnets on his title-page in 1594 the French term ‘amours,’ but bestowed on his imaginary heroine the title 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 deceasèd 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 entitled ‘Idea’ [105] (after the French) that if any sought genuine passion 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 entitled ‘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 intituled The Student’s Loove or Hatrid.’ [106b]  Chapman in 1595, in a series of sonnets entitled ‘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 ‘bastard 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 manuscript 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 lxxxvii. 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 vassalage,’ 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 composèd 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 pronounced.  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 Benedick to ‘write her a sonnet in praise of her beauty.’  Benedick jestingly promises one so ‘in high a style that no man living shall come over it.’  Subsequently (V. iv. 87) Benedick is convicted, to the amusement of his friends, of penning ‘a halting sonnet of his own pure brain’ in praise of Beatrice.

VIII—THE BORROWED CONCEITS OF THE SONNETS

At a first glance a far larger proportion of Shakespeare’s sonnets give the reader the illusion of personal confessions than those of any contemporary, but when allowance has been made for the current conventions of Elizabethan sonnetteering, as well as for Shakespeare’s unapproached affluence in dramatic instinct and invention—an affluence which enabled him to identify himself with every phase of emotion—the autobiographic element in his sonnets, although it may not be dismissed altogether, is seen to shrink to slender proportions.  As soon as the collection is studied comparatively with the many thousand sonnets that the printing presses of England, France, and Italy poured forth during the last years of the sixteenth century, a vast number of Shakespeare’s performances prove to be little more than professional trials of skill, often of superlative merit, to which he deemed himself challenged by the efforts of contemporary practitioners.  The thoughts and words of the sonnets of Daniel, Drayton, Watson, Barnabe Barnes, Constable, and Sidney were assimilated by Shakespeare in his poems as consciously and with as little compunction as the plays and novels of contemporaries in his dramatic work.  To Drayton he was especially indebted. [110]  Such resemblances as are visible between Shakespeare’s sonnets and those of Petrarch or Desportes seem due to his study of the English imitators of those sonnetteers.  Most of Ronsard’s nine hundred sonnets and many of his numerous odes were accessible to Shakespeare in English adaptations, but there are a few signs that Shakespeare had recourse to Ronsard direct.

Adapted or imitated conceits are scattered over the whole of Shakespeare’s collection.  They are usually manipulated with consummate skill, but Shakespeare’s indebtedness is not thereby obscured.  Shakespeare in many beautiful sonnets describes spring and summer, night and sleep and their influence on amorous emotion.  Such topics are common themes of the poetry of the Renaissance, and they figure in Shakespeare’s pages clad in the identical livery that clothed them in the sonnets of Petrarch, Ronsard, De Baïf, and Desportes, or of English disciples of the Italian and French masters. [111]  In Sonnet xxiv. Shakespeare develops Ronsard’s conceit that his love’s portrait is painted on his heart; and in Sonnet cxxii. he repeats something of Ronsard’s phraseology in describing how his friend, who has just made him a gift of ‘tables,’ is ‘character’d’ in his brain. [112a]  Sonnet xcix., which reproaches the flowers with stealing their charms from the features of his love, is adapted from Constable’s sonnet to Diana (No. ix.), and may be matched in other collections.  Elsewhere Shakespeare meditates on the theory that man is an amalgam of the four elements, earth, water, air, and fire (xl.-xlv.) [112b]  In all these he reproduces, with such embellishments as his genius dictated, phrases and sentiments of Daniel, Drayton, Barnes, and Watson, who imported them direct from France and Italy.  In two or three instances Shakespeare showed his reader that he was engaged in a mere literary exercise by offering him alternative renderings of the same conventional conceit.  In Sonnets xlvi. and xlvii. he paraphrases twice over—appropriating many of Watson’s words—the unexhilarating notion that the eye and heart are in perpetual dispute as to which has the greater influence on lovers. [113a]  In the concluding sonnets, cliii. and cliv., he gives alternative versions of an apologue illustrating the potency of love which first figured in the Greek anthology, had been translated into Latin, and subsequently won the notice of English, French, and Italian sonnetteers. [113b]

Shakespeare’s claims of immortality for his sonnets a borrowed conceit.

In the numerous sonnets in which Shakespeare boasted that his verse was so certain of immortality that it was capable of immortalising the person to whom it was addressed, he gave voice to no conviction that was peculiar to his mental constitution, to no involuntary exaltation of spirit, or spontaneous ebullition of feeling.  He was merely proving that he could at will, and with superior effect, handle a theme that Ronsard and Desportes, emulating Pindar, Horace, Ovid, and other classical poets, had lately made a commonplace of the poetry of Europe. [114a]  Sir Philip Sidney, in his ‘Apologie for Poetrie’ (1595) wrote that it was the common habit of poets to tell you that they will make you immortal by their verses. [114b]  ‘Men of great calling,’ Nash wrote in his ‘Pierce Pennilesse,’ 1593, ‘take it of merit to have their names eternised by poets.’ [114c]  In the hands of Elizabethan sonnetteers the ‘eternising’ faculty of their verse became a staple and indeed an inevitable topic.  Spenser wrote in his ‘Amoretti’ (1595, Sonnet lxxv.)

Shakespeare, in his references to his ‘eternal lines’ (xviii. 12) and in the assurances that he gives the subject of his addresses that the sonnets are, in Daniel’s exact phrase, his ‘monument’ (lxxxi. 9, cvii. 13), was merely accommodating himself to the prevailing taste.  Characteristically in Sonnet lv. he invested the topic with a splendour that was not approached by any other poet: [115]

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme; [116]
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone besmear’d with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
‘Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
  So, till the judgement that yourself arise,
  You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.

The imitative element is no less conspicuous in the sonnets that Shakespeare distinctively addresses to a woman.  In two of the latter (cxxxv.-vi.), where he quibbles over the fact of the identity of his own name of Will with a lady’s ‘will’ (the synonym in Elizabethan English of both ‘lust’ and ‘obstinacy’), he derisively challenges comparison with wire-drawn conceits of rival sonnetteers, especially of Barnabe Barnes, who had enlarged on his disdainful mistress’s ‘wills,’ and had turned the word ‘grace’ to the same punning account as Shakespeare turned the word ‘will.’ [118a]  Similarly in Sonnet cxxx. beginning

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red . . .
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head, [118b]

he satirises the conventional lists of precious stones, metals, and flowers, to which the sonnetteers likened their mistresses’ features.

The praise of ‘blackness.’

In two sonnets (cxxvii. and cxxxii.) Shakespeare amiably notices the black complexion, hair, and eyes of his mistress, and expresses a preference for features of that hue over those of the fair hue which was, he tells us, more often associated in poetry with beauty.  He commends the ‘dark lady’ for refusing to practise those arts by which other women of the day gave their hair and faces colours denied them by Nature.  Here Shakespeare repeats almost verbatim his own lines in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’(IV. iii. 241-7), where the heroine Rosaline is described as ‘black as ebony,’ with ‘brows decked in black,’ and in ‘mourning’ for her fashionable sisters’ indulgence in the disguising arts of the toilet.  ‘No face is fair that is not full so black,’ exclaims Rosaline’s lover.  But neither in the sonnets nor in the play can Shakespeare’s praise of ‘blackness’ claim the merit of being his own invention.  Sir Philip Sidney, in sonnet vii. of his ‘Astrophel and Stella,’ had anticipated it.  The ‘beams’ of the eyes of Sidney’s mistress were ‘wrapt in colour black’ and wore ‘this mourning weed,’ so

That whereas black seems beauty’s contrary,
She even in black doth make all beauties flow. [119a]

To his praise of ‘blackness’ in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ Shakespeare appends a playful but caustic comment on the paradox that he detects in the conceit. [119b]  Similarly, the sonnets, in which a dark complexion is pronounced to be a mark of beauty, are followed by others in which the poet argues in self-confutation that blackness of feature is hideous in a woman, and invariably indicates moral turpitude or blackness of heart.  Twice, in much the same language as had already served a like purpose in the play, does he mock his ‘dark lady’ with this uncomplimentary interpretation of dark-coloured hair and eyes.

But external evidence is more conclusive as to the artificial construction of the vituperative sonnets.  Again a comparison of this series with the efforts of the modish sonnetteers assigns to it its true character.  Every sonnetteer of the sixteenth century, at some point in his career, devoted his energies to vituperation of a cruel siren.  Ronsard in his sonnets celebrated in language quite as furious as Shakespeare’s a ‘fierce tigress,’ a ‘murderess,’ a ‘Medusa.’  Barnabe Barnes affected to contend in his sonnets with a female ‘tyrant,’ a ‘Medusa,’ a ‘rock.’  ‘Women’ (Barnes laments) ‘are by nature proud as devils.’  The monotonous and artificial regularity with which the sonnetteers sounded the vituperative stop, whenever they had exhausted their notes of adulation, excited ridicule in both England and France.  In Shakespeare’s early life the convention was wittily parodied by Gabriel Harvey in ‘An Amorous Odious sonnet intituled The Student’s Loove or Hatrid, or both or neither, or what shall please the looving or hating reader, either in sport or earnest, to make of such contrary passions as are here discoursed.’ [121]  After extolling the beauty and virtue of his mistress above that of Aretino’s Angelica, Petrarch’s Laura, Catullus’s Lesbia, and eight other far-famed objects of poetic adoration, Harvey suddenly denounces her in burlesque rhyme as ‘a serpent in brood,’ ‘a poisonous toad,’ ‘a heart of marble,’ and ‘a stony mind as passionless as a block.’  Finally he tells her,

If ever there were she-devils incarnate,
They are altogether in thee incorporate.

Jodelle’s ‘Contr’ Amours.’

In France Etienne Jodelle, a professional sonnetteer although he is best known as a dramatist, made late in the second half of the sixteenth century an independent endeavour of like kind to stifle by means of parody the vogue of the vituperative sonnet.  Jodelle designed a collection of three hundred sonnets which he inscribed to ‘hate of a woman,’ and he appropriately entitled them ‘Contr’ Amours’ in distinction from ‘Amours,’ the term applied to sonnets in the honeyed vein.  Only seven of Jodelle’s ‘Contr’ Amours’ are extant, but there is sufficient identity of tone between them and Shakespeare’s vituperative efforts almost to discover in Shakespeare’s invectives a spark of Jodelle’s satiric fire. [122]  The dark lady of Shakespeare’s ‘sonnets’ may therefore be relegated to the ranks of the creatures of his fancy.  It is quite possible that he may have met in real life a dark-complexioned siren, and it is possible that he may have fared ill at her disdainful hands.  But no such incident is needed to account for the presence of ‘the dark lady’ in the sonnets.  It was the exacting conventions of the sonnetteering contagion, and not his personal experiences or emotions, that impelled Shakespeare to give ‘the dark lady’ of his sonnets a poetic being. [123]  She has been compared, not very justly, with Shakespeare’s splendid creation of Cleopatra in his play of ‘Antony and Cleopatra.’  From one point of view the same criticism may be passed on both.  There is no greater and no less ground for seeking in Shakespeare’s personal environment the original of ‘the dark lady’ of his sonnets than for seeking there the original of his Queen of Egypt.

IX—THE PATRONAGE OF THE EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON

Subsequently he regretfully pointed out how his patron’s readiness to accept the homage of other poets seemed to be thrusting him from the enviable place of pre-eminence in his patron’s esteem.

The Earl of Southampton, the patron of his narrative poems, is the only patron of Shakespeare that is known to biographical research.  No contemporary document or tradition gives the faintest suggestion that Shakespeare was the friend or dependent of any other man of rank.  A trustworthy tradition corroborates the testimony respecting Shakespeare’s close intimacy with the Earl that is given in the dedicatory epistles of his ‘Venus and Adonis’ and ‘Lucrece’, penned respectively in 1593 and 1594.  According to Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeare’s first adequate biographer, ‘there is one instance so singular in its magnificence of this patron of Shakespeare’s that if I had not been assured that the story was handed down by Sir William D’Avenant, who was probably very well acquainted with his affairs, I should not venture to have inserted; that my Lord Southampton at one time gave him a thousand pounds to enable him to go through with a purchase which he heard he had a mind to.  A bounty very great and very rare at any time.’

The love [127] I dedicate to your lordship is without end; whereof this pamphlet, without beginning, is but a superfluous moiety.  The warrant I have of your honourable disposition, not the worth of my untutored lines, makes it assured of acceptance.  What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have, devoted yours.  Were my worth greater, my duty would show greater; meantime, as it is, it is bound to your lordship, to whom I wish long life, still lengthened with all happiness.

Your lordship’s in all duty,
William Shakespeare.

Sonnet xxvi. is a gorgeous rendering of these sentences:—

Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage
Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit,
To thee I send this written ambassage,
To witness duty, not to show my wit:
Duty so great, which wit so poor as mine
May make seem bare, in wanting words to show it,
But that I hope some good conceit of thine
In thy soul’s thought, all naked, will bestow it;
Till whatsoever star that guides my moving,
Points on me graciously with fair aspect,
And puts apparel on my tatter’d loving
To show me worthy of thy sweet respect
  Then may I dare to boast how I do love thee;
  Till then not show my head where thou may’st prove me. [128]

The ‘Lucrece’ epistle’s intimation that the patron’s love alone gives value to the poet’s ‘untutored lines’ is repeated in Sonnet xxxii., which doubtless reflected a moment of depression:

If thou survive my well-contented day,
When that churl Death my bones with dust shall cover,
And shalt by fortune once more re-survey
These poor rude lines of thy deceased lover,
Compare them with the bettering of the time,
And though they be outstripp’d by every pen,
Reserve them for my love, not for their rhyme,
Exceeded by the height of happier men.
O, then vouchsafe me but this loving thought:
‘Had my friend’s Muse grown with this growing age,
A dearer birth than this his love had brought,
To march in ranks of better equipage; [129]
  But since he died and poets better prove,
  Theirs for their style I’ll read, his for his love.’

A like vein is pursued in greater exaltation of spirit in Sonnet xxxviii.:

How can my Muse want subject to invent,
While thou dost breathe, that pour’st into my verse
Thine own sweet argument, too excellent
For every vulgar paper to rehearse?
O give thyself the thanks, if aught in me
Worthy perusal stand against thy sight;
For who’s so dumb that cannot write to thee,
When thou thyself dost give invention light?
Be thou the tenth Muse, ten times more in worth
Than those old nine which rhymers invocate;
And he that calls on thee, let him bring forth
Eternal numbers to outlive long date.
  If my slight Muse do please these curious days,
  The pain be mine, but thine shall be the praise.

The central conceit here so finely developed—that the patron may claim as his own handiwork the protégé’s verse because he inspires it—belongs to the most conventional schemes of dedicatory adulation.  When Daniel, in 1592, inscribed his volume of sonnets entitled ‘Delia’ to the Countess of Pembroke, he played in the prefatory sonnet on the same note, and used in the concluding couplet almost the same words as Shakespeare.  Daniel wrote:

The identification of the rival poets whose ‘richly compiled’ ‘comments’ of his patron’s ‘praise’ excited Shakespeare’s jealousy is a more difficult inquiry than the identification of the patron.  The rival poets with their ‘precious phrase by all the Muses filed’ (lxxxv. 4) must be sought among the writers who eulogised Southampton and are known to have shared his patronage.  The field of choice is not small.  Southampton from boyhood cultivated literature and the society of literary men.  In 1594 no nobleman received so abundant a measure of adulation from the contemporary world of letters. [131a]  Thomas Nash justly described the Earl, when dedicating to him his ‘Life of Jack Wilton’ in 1594, as ‘a dear lover and cherisher as well of the lovers of poets as of the poets themselves.’  Nash addressed to him many affectionately phrased sonnets.  The prolific sonnetteer Barnabe Barnes and the miscellaneous literary practitioner Gervase Markham confessed, respectively in 1593 and 1595, yearnings for Southampton’s countenance in sonnets which glow hardly less ardently than Shakespeare’s with admiration for his personal charm.  Similarly John Florio, the Earl’s Italian tutor, who is traditionally reckoned among Shakespeare’s literary acquaintances, [131b] wrote to Southampton in 1598, in his dedicatory epistle before his ‘Worlde of Wordes’ (an Italian-English dictionary), ‘as to me and many more, the glorious and gracious sunshine of your honour hath infused light and life.’

Shakespeare’s fear of a rival poet.

Shakespeare magnanimously and modestly described that protégé of Southampton, whom he deemed a specially dangerous rival, as an ‘able’ and a ‘better’ ‘spirit,’ ‘a worthier pen,’ a vessel of ‘tall building and of goodly pride,’ compared with whom he was himself ‘a worthless boat.’  He detected a touch of magic in the man’s writing.  His ‘spirit,’ Shakespeare hyperbolically declared, had been ‘by spirits taught to write above a mortal pitch,’ and ‘an affable familiar ghost’ nightly gulled him with intelligence.  Shakespeare’s dismay at the fascination exerted on his patron by ‘the proud full sail of his [rival’s] great verse’ sealed for a time, he declared, the springs of his own invention (lxxxvi.)

There is no need to insist too curiously on the justice of Shakespeare’s laudation of the other poet’s’ powers.  He was presumably a new-comer in the literary field who surprised older men of benevolent tendency into admiration by his promise rather than by his achievement.  ‘Eloquence and courtesy,’ wrote Gabriel Harvey at the time, ‘are ever bountiful in the amplifying vein;’ and writers of amiability, Harvey adds, habitually blazoned the perfections that they hoped to see their young friends achieve, in language implying that they had already achieved them.  All the conditions of the problem are satisfied by the rival’s identification with the young poet and scholar Barnabe Barnes, a poetic panegyrist of Southampton and a prolific sonnetteer, who was deemed by contemporary critics certain to prove a great poet.  His first collection of sonnets, ‘Parthenophil and Parthenophe,’ with many odes and madrigals interspersed, was printed in 1593; and his second, ‘A Centurie of Spiritual Sonnets,’ in 1595.  Loud applause greeted the first book, which included numerous adaptations from the classical, Italian, and French poets, and disclosed, among many crudities, some fascinating lyrics and at least one almost perfect sonnet (No. lxvi. ‘Ah, sweet content, where is thy mild abode?’)  Thomas Churchyard called Barnes ‘Petrarch’s scholar;’ the learned Gabriel Harvey bade him ‘go forward in maturity as he had begun in pregnancy,’ and ‘be the gallant poet, like Spenser;’ Campion judged his verse to be ‘heady and strong.’  In a sonnet that Barnes addressed in this earliest volume to the ‘virtuous’ Earl of Southampton he declared that his patron’s eyes were ‘the heavenly lamps that give the Muses light,’ and that his sole ambition was ‘by flight to rise’ to a height worthy of his patron’s ‘virtues.’  Shakespeare sorrowfully pointed out in Sonnet lxxviii. that his lord’s eyes

while in the following sonnet he asserted that the ‘worthier pen’ of his dreaded rival when lending his patron ‘virtue’ was guilty of plagiarism, for he ‘stole that word’ from his patron’s ‘behaviour.’  The emphasis laid by Barnes on the inspiration that he sought from Southampton’s ‘gracious eyes’ on the one hand, and his reiterated references to his patron’s ‘virtue’ on the other, suggest that Shakespeare in these sonnets directly alluded to Barnes as his chief competitor in the hotly contested race for Southampton’s favour.  In Sonnet lxxxv. Shakespeare declares that ‘he cries Amen to every hymn that able spirit [i.e. his rival] affords.’  Very few poets of the day in England followed Ronsard’s practice of bestowing the title of hymn on miscellaneous poems, but Barnes twice applies the word to his poems of love. [134a]  When, too, Shakespeare in Sonnet lxxx. employs nautical metaphors to indicate the relations of himself and his rival with his patron—

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 identity.

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 nobleman 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.

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 identity 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 illustrate a real intimacy subsisting between Shakespeare and a young Mæcenas.

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 passion 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 pronounced 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 assured his friend that he could never grow old (civ.), that the finest types of beauty and chivalry in mediæval 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 assurances to their patrons.  Southampton was only one of a crowd of Mæcenases 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.”’

Edmund Spenser in a fine sonnet told his patron, Admiral Lord Charles Howard, that ‘his good personage and noble 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 nobleman 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 associates 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, passed his thirtieth birthday in 1594, and he probably tended, when on the threshold of middle life, to exaggerate the youthfulness of the nobleman 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 identity 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.

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]