Shakespeare's story of his life

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INTRODUCTION _. . . . . I-14 BOOK I

SHAKESPEARE’S STORY IN THE SONNETS CHAP.

Chapter I The Key To The Sonnets

SHAKESPEARE prepared his Sonnets for the press and had them published in 1609, probably among the last things he did before he left London. It may be assumed that he had some hesitation about printing them at all, for 1t was not until he had fulfilled Horace’s conditions for doubtful literary matter, namely, to keep it in your desk in monum annum, until the ninth year, that he sent them to the press, the copyright having been taken out on 20th May 1609, just into the ninth year from the date of the events in the last sonnets. If he had any belief in their promise of an eternity of fame to himself (S. 107) and to the principal person addressed in them (S. 81), he must have looked on the book as testamentary. But he must have known that he was throwing an enigma to the world, to make what it could of ; and therefore he went as far as he thought fit in supplying a key, the printed text giving here and there (as the sequel will show) such clues as typography can give to the identity of persons. He might indeed have been more explicit, for example, by writing headings to the several sonnets, as some of his contemporaries did; but he was naturally chary of revealing more than circumstances warranted at the time. At the end of the volume he printed a remarkable poem, ‘A Lover’s Complaint,’ which, if also enigmatic, seems to be meant somehow to help out the story of the Sonnets (“their distract parcels in 17 c combined sums’’) ; and in it he has left a valuable hint of what his method was in the enigma—he gives us his view of the capabilities and uses of the sonnet as a lyrical form. It is the more necessary to recall this hint, inasmuch as Wordsworth has missed it in his categories of sonnet-writers (“Scorn not the sonnet,” etc.). His first example is, ‘‘ With this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart’; but some have doubted the fact, Browning among them. It would have been more correct to have added, “and with the same key he locked up his meaning.” His own view of the sonnet is hardly expressed by any of Wordsworth’s examples ; it is called ‘‘deep-brained,” and is likened to the diamond, the emerald, the sapphire, or the opal—

Each several stone, With wit well blazon’d, smiled or made some moan.

There are only a few of the whole one hundred and fifty-four sonnets so vehement and impassioned as to haye no place for wit; in some even of the gravest kind, and in all the rest, there is wit everywhere. One is apt to think that Milton’s characteristics of “TL Allegro’’ and of “Il Penseroso,” if they were ever being mixed, would best express the spirit and method of the Sonnets—the “‘ quips and cranks and wanton wiles ”’ of the cheerful man, with the ‘“‘ sage and solemn tunes ”’ of the pensive man, “‘ where more is meant than meets the ear.”’ It is noteworthy that Milton uses in “II Penseroso”’ a striking figure, ‘‘ forget thyself to marble,” which he had used before in his Epitaph on Shakespeare : surely he was thinking of the Sonnets of 1609 quite as much as of the Folio of 1623:

For whilst to th’ shame of slow-endeavoring art Thy easy numbers flow, and that each heart Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued book Those Delphic lines with deep impression took, Then thou, our fancy of itself bereaving,

Dost make us marble with too much conceiving.

THEIR DEDICATION

It is a long way from that to certain modern views, which see in the Sonnets either “frigid conceits”’ or such veiled personal meanings as the author never meant to be given to the world.

The most damnable of all the recent heresies is, that the Sonnets were abstracted from the author’s desk, and published without his leave by a low bookseller, who at the same time annexed the ‘ Lover’s Complaint,’— ‘‘with characteristic insolence,” as one authority says. The single ground of this queer hypothesis is, that the dedication of the volume is made by the publisher and not by the author—as if the author had not an obvious and imperative reason for putting forward the convenient publisher to dedicate the book to its “only begetter ”’ (the phrase covering a sly joke, see p. 68), wishing him all happiness now that years had passed and bygones were bygones, the reason, namely, that, on the book’s own showing, they had met last in a deadly quarrel, and had parted with the evoi of S. 125 flung at his false friend’s head by the angry playwright :

Hence, thou suborn’d Isformer! a true soul, When most impeach’d stands least in thy control.

How can any one maintain that the quarto of 1609 had not been prepared for the press by the author himself? The longer sequence of one hundred and twenty-six sonnets is, at all events, a natural order, which hardly admits of rearrangement, and must have been designed. Mr. Wyndham finds evidence also of the author’s care for his copy, as one piece, if not for the proof-sheets of the book, in the high degree ot uniformity with which italics (with capitals) are used for certain words to the number of thirty-six, as well as in the methodical use of capitals for a much larger group of common nouns (some two hundred) which he classifies under five heads. It is, of course, arguable that the copy had been found by the supposed thief in a condition all ready for the press; and it may be urged that the printed text shows so many errors and so much careless pointing that the author could hardly have taken pains to correct the proofs, and possibly may not have seen them. But the state of the text, which, as Boaden said, is “‘ neither careless nor inelegant,” is not that of a book printed without the author’s knowledge. Any one who is curious to see the difference between a posthumous edition and an author’s edition of a work of that age may compare the 4th edition of Davison’s Poetical Rapsodie, 1621, with one of the three editions printed in his lifetime. Supposing the copy to have been stolen, and printed without his knowledge, he could have stopped it, as he probably stopped some of the sonnets which were circulating among his friends long before: a book made up of Amores by J. D. (Sir John Davies) “with certeine othyr sonnetes by W. S.”’ was entered on the Stationers’ Register, 3rd January 1600, by Eleazer Edgar, but 1s not heard of again.

The words printed in italics with initial capitals will strike every one who uses the original text. There is one in the second line of the opening sonnet—namely, Rose: it is the keynote. There is another, Hews, in S. 20, which is obviously a play between a proper name and the common noun “hew,” or “hue.”’ In Sonnets 135 and 136 there are ten printings of Will, to pun with the word for volition or desire (‘‘ for my name is Will’), and one more in S. 143. Besides these thirteen, there are twenty-three more, which Mr. Wyndham accounts for severally (all but the Jnformer of S. 125) as “either a proper name or else of Greek or Latin extraction.” But that is hardly the correct principle. All the names from classical mythology, along with Eve from Biblical, are printed uniformly in italics, to the number of eleven, and with these the adjective Grecian 1s included by a slip. The vigilance with which these scattered names had been underlined is in marked contrast to the carelessness of Thomas Watson’

THE WORDS IN ITALICS

Tears of Fancy, a posthumous volume of sonnets (1593); in which nineteen of the names from Ovid are in italics and fourteen of them in roman (in a copy which wants Sonnets 9-16).

Next we come to a group of words, not only of Latin or Greek “extraction,” as Mr. Wyndham says (which would be a wide class), but pure Latin or Greek or Arabic— Quietus, Interim, Audit (twice), Statue (elsewhere statua), Abism, and Alcumie—every instance of the kind is in italics except one “audit” and one “alcumie.” In the ‘Lover’s Complaint’ the close observance of the rule is almost startling. There is only one word in italics in the whole forty-seven stanzas —namely, Alloes, bitter aloes, in stanza 39, being a pure Greek word of three syllables like statua in Latin ; and that is the only word in all the poem (excepting one “audit’’) that calls for italics, according to the typographical rules deduced from the Sonnets.

There remain only four of the italicised words to deal with, besides Rose, Hews, and the eleven W1//s— namely, Informer, Autumne, Heriticke, and Alien in the ‘alien pen”’ of the rival poet of S. 78. It may be said that “alien ”’ 1s Law Latin like “‘audit,’’ and should be in the same group ; but it was much too old a synonym for ‘‘ stranger ” to be still treated as a pure Latin word, having been in Wyclif’s Bible both as an adjective and a substantive ; besides, there is no propriety in using it in “alien pen” for its literal meaning : it is italicised just because it is used for some other purpose. So also the italics in “thou suborn’d Informer” are a special underlining, the sting of which would have been felt by the person to whom the sonnet was written. Autumne in S. 104, in the context of six other seasons or months not in italics, is thus emphasised because it is ‘‘ childing Autumn,” or the season of fruitfulness. Heriticke occurs in the remarkable phrase of S. 124, “ policy, that Heretic” (compare ‘ Twelfth Night,’ IIT. ii. 33), which has a sufficient meaning in the original Greek sense of

“policy, that free-to-choose”’ ; but it is underlined also to point to an individual who was a heretic, as Ben Jonson defines the term: Puritanus Hypocritica est Haereticus ; therefore the italics, to distinguish its use here from its ordinary ecclesiastical use elsewhere (eight times in the Plays). After these, we are left with Rose, Hews, Alien, and the Wills ; and these contain the key or keys to the enigma of the real personages and events of the Sonnets.

Tyrwhitt’s explanation of the line in S. 2o—

A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted. .. . A man in hew, all Heeos in his controlling

—was that Hews (Hughes) was some one’s surname ; but he had not attempted to construe ‘‘ Controlling all Hews (or Hughes) in his own hew’’—4+.e. in his own mien or aspect. Hews is not a surname singular, with a possessive ending, but the plural of a proper name, as the “‘all Hews” requires it to be. It is a play upon one of the baronies or courtesy titles of the Earl of Pembroke, Fitzhugh, or Fitzhew; so that the line construes: ‘A man in hew, [my lord Fitzhew], the lord of all the sons of Hew.” In like manner, in the opening couplet of S. 1:—

From fairest creatures we desire increase, That thereby beauty’s Rose might never die

—Rose is my lord Rose, my lord Ros of Kendal, another of the Pembroke baronies. The only real barony of the earldom of Pembroke at that time was Herbert of Cardiff, which was young Herbert’s proper courtesy title ; but his father, the second earl, who was much engrossed with genealogy and heraldry, had annexed, on the death without issue of his maternal uncle Lord Parr in 1571, a whole garland of ancient or semi-legendary baronies, two of which—Marmion and St. Quentin—were, according to Dugdale, never alive at all as baronies of the realm, while the other three or 22

MY LORD ROSE four were probably defunct — namely, the primary barony of Parr and its pendants Fitzhew, Ros of Kendal, and Hart (in Northamptonshire), the last having been a new creation by patent of Henry VIII. to the last Lord Parr. All of these, excepting Hart, continued to be given as Pembroke baronies as late as the 1812 edition of Collins’s Peerage, and it is clear that they were in actual use in Shakespeare’s time, from a sonnet of Francis Davison (1602) addressed to William, Earl of Pembroke, Lord Herbert of Cardiff, Marmion, and St. Quintin.

Shakespeare’s favourite among these courtesy titles appears to have been my lord Ros, which made a good pet name as my lord Rose. The imagery of the Rose (always with a capital), including its colours, perfumes, distilled essence, thorns, and canker, recurs in sonnet after sonnet, and may run through all the fourteen lines, as in S. 54 and S.95. In the latter there is a line which is conclusive proof that he knew W. H. by the name of Rose :

How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame, Which, like a canker in the fragrant Rose, Doth spot the beauty of thy budding name ! Oh in what sweets dost thou thy sins inclose ! That tongue that tells the story of thy days, (Making lascivious comments on thy sport) Cannot dispraise but in a kind of praise : Naming thy name blesses an ill report.

Oh what a mansion have those vices got, Which for their habitation chose out thee, Where beauty’s veil doth cover every blot, And all things turns to fair that eyes can sce !

What other name than Rose can be said, in the naming of it, to bless an ill report? As Bishop Hall says : “Anything passes well under the rose.” The sonnet might have been headed either Sub Rosa or Couleur de Rose. Again, as late as S. 109, we find Rose in the last couplet, although nothing in the sonnet leads up to it as a figure of speech :

For nothing this wide universe I call, Save thou, my Rose ; in it thou art my all.

It is the old pet name escaping from him, the same name as in S. 89: and in my tongue Thy sweet beloved name no more shall dwell.

That the sweet name was Rose is the more probable from the parallel case of Rosaline in ‘ Love’s Labour’s Lost ’:

When tongues speak sweetly, then they name her name, And Rosaline they call her.

The other Pembroke baronies were not so well suited to allegorial or paronomastic uses ; the single attempt with Fitzhew, “all Hews in his controlling,” 1s ingenious but not neat. It is not easy to pun upon Parr, while Marmion and St. Quentin are best left alone. But one can imagine Hart (Heart) being treated like Ros ; and it is not impossible that occasional puns upon it are intended, although the pair of antithetic sonnets, 46 and 47, upon the heart and the eye, are best explained as a parody of Watson’s jingling pair, 19 and 20 of the Years of Fancy. It is probable that the garland of semi-legendary or defunct Pembroke baronies, and the numerous ancestry involved in them, are wittily pointed at in the mysterious Sonnet 31, which would be headed, ‘‘ Dead Baronies alive again” (‘“‘love” being used, as in some other places, in the figurative sense of “ generation ’’):

Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts

Which I by lacking have supposed dead ;

And there reigns Love and all Love’s loving parts, And all those friends which I thought buried. How many a holy and obsequious tear

Hath dear religious love stol’n from mine eyes

As interest of the dead, which now appear

But things remov’d that hidden in thee lie.

PEMBROKE HERALDRY

Thou art the grave where buried love doth live, Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone, Who all their parts of me to thee did give, That due of many now is thine alone.

Their images I lov’d I view in thee

And thou (all they) hast all the all of me.

Besides the genealogy, the heraldry of the Pembroke family comes also into two sonnets. The mock-sublime imagery of the apostrophe to Time in S. 19, a lion with retracted claws, a tiger with toothless “ yaws,’’ and a phoenix, are very nearly the supporters and crest of the Pembroke arms, the panther supporter being changed into a tiger, and the wyvern of the crest into the more familiar and equally fabulous pheenix :

Devouring Time, blunt thou the Lion’s paws, And make the Earth devour her own sweet brood, Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce Tiger’s yaws, And burn the long-lived Phoenix in her blood.

To explain the second line one must go to heraldry. The lion the brood of the earth is the heraldic lion issuant, as Milton also conceives him in his primal creation, Paradise Lost, vii. 463; the sweet brood of the earth being devoured by its mother would be the lion in the opposite heraldic situation, whatever it may be called in heraldry.

The second instance is S. 105, which might be headed with the Pembroke motto—Ung je servirai:

Let not my love be called Idolatry,

Nor my beloved as an Idol show,

Since all alike my songs and praises be

To one, of one, still such, and ever so. Kind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind, Still constant in a wondrous excellence ; Therefore my verse to constancy confin’d, One thing expressing, leaves out difference.

The “Idolatry ” and “Idol” of the opening lines point clearly to a portrait (as in ‘ Two Gentlemen of Verona,’

IV. ii. 129) which would have had the family motto painted on it. One of the engraved portraits of Lord Pembroke has Ung je serviray in large letters round the border. In the second half of the sonnet, the play of ideas is upon the Parr motto, Amour avec loyauté:

Fair, kind, and true is all my argument,

—Fair, kind, and true varying to other words—

And in this change is my invention spent :

Three themes in one which wondrous scope affords.

Fair, kind, and true have often lived alone, Which three till now never kept seat in one.

The date of this corresponds with Lord Herbert’s accession to the Earldom of Pembroke.

The identity of the person addressed, in the first series of sonnets, with Lord Pembroke being thus determined beyond reasonable doubt, according to the original guess of Mr. Heywood Bright of Lincoln’s Inn (1818), on grounds which his fastidiousness in completing his proof kept him from ever publishing, and according to the evidence of Mr. Boaden in 1832, which Hallam and many others have held to be sufficient for practical assent although it was not a ‘strict’ proof, it becomes easy to fix the dates of the several events which inspired certain groups of the Sonnets. The opening series—1-17—addressed to a youth unwilling to marry, are explained by the unsuccessful project of marriage, in 1597, between Lord Herbert, aged seventeen, and Bridget Vere, daughter of the Earl of Oxford. In the spring of 1598 young Herbert commenced residence in London, and appeared at Court—

His years but young, but his experience old ; His head unmellow’d, but his judgement ripe

—like Proteus arriving at the Court of Milan in

‘The Two Gentlemen of Verona.’ An intimacy with

Shakespeare appears to have been struck up at once, | 26

DATES FIXED the traces of which are in the latter half of the series of affectionate and admiring Sonnets 1-32. If it should seem, as it seemed to Hallam, that these and other sonnets betray an “excessive and misplaced affection,’ it, should be kept in mind as explaining the writer's obviously sincere compliments to the young noble, “the world’s fresh ornament,” that Clarendon, in his faithful portrait of Lord Pembroke, declares him to have been “the most universally loved and esteemed of any man of that age.’’ Before long (“he was but one hour mine”’) an unpleasantness arose between them about the lady who was the poet’s mistress. This comes into eight sonnets as a very serious matter ; but after S. 42 it is dropped, and does not appear again until S. 93, but for passing references to jealousy in Sonnets 57, 58, and 61, and to slander or suspicion, like a crow in the clear sky, in S. 70. The sonnets from 43 to 63 correspond with an uneventful period, during part of which the writer seems to have been on tour as an actor. S. 60 is on Christmas and the New Year. Next comes a striking sequence of three, 64-66, which suit exactly the title of one of Spenser’s poems, ‘“ The Ruins of Time,” and were doubtless inspired by that poet’s sad death in ruined circumstances at his lodging in King Street, Westminster, on 8th January 1599. The series of ten which follow, 67-76, are notable for their despondent tone, and for one probable hint of suicide in S. 74 (“the coward conquest of a wretch’s knife’’).

One cause of the despondency is, that Lord Herbert has come within the influence of some “ infection,” which I shall show afterwards (in Chapter IX.) to have been that of Lord Southampton, lately returned to London from his dissipations in Paris. If Southampton had been still Shakespeare’s patron, the tone of these sonnets would be unaccountable ; but, in fact, he had become his enemy, and was plotting against him. Then comes the remarkable episode of the Rival Poet in nine sonnets, 78-86, with the bitter feelings which it left behind, in six more sonnets. S. 77, the next before the rival-poet series begins, gives us a clue to the date. It is written to accompany the gift of a blank-book, or table-book, in which it was probably inscribed. Malone pointed out that it was the custom to make such gifts on New Year’s Day; but Steevens cited the case of Lord Orrery sending Swift a pocket-book on his birthday, with just such another sonnet written in it. The theme was the lapse of time ; and as it is young Herbert's natal years (“‘ thy precious minutes ’’) rather than calendar years that are meant, the occasion was probably his birthday. If we take it to have been his nineteenth birthday, the date of S. 77 would have been 8th April 1599. The very next sonnet opens the affair of the rival poet, which with its bitter sequel may be supposed to carry us towards the end of that year. There was then a break in the correspondence. Summer, autumn, and the next spring are named as the seasons of absence; but it is probable that the lines on Winter in S. 97 must be taken literally and not allegorically :

How like a Winter hath my absence been

From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year! What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen, What old December’s bareness everywhere !

He goes on as if the season had not really been winter, but winter only in his feelings and thoughts :

And yet this time remov’d was summer’s time, The teeming Autumn, big with rich increase, Bearing the wanton burthen of the prime, Like widow’d wombs after their Lords’ decease. Yet this abundant issue seem’d to me But hope of Orphans and unfathered fruit ; For Summer and his pleasures wait on thee, And thou away the very birds are mute. Or if they sing, ’tis with so dull a cheer That leaves look pale, dreading the Winter’s near.

The meaning of all this exquisite allegory cannot be 28

DATES FIXED made clear just yet. But the conclusion from it would be that Summer and Autumn, the pretended seasons, are brought in for the sake of the ideas of pleasure and fecundity, and that the sonnet was written actually for winter, notwithstanding the words ‘“ And yet this time removed was,” etc. The need for making the real date winter appears from the next sonnet, 98, which is on Spring, and cannot have followed a Summerand-Autumn sonnet. Mr. Wyndham has found another clue to the date of the Spring sonnet, 98:

From you have I been absent in the spring, When proud pied April, dressed in all his trim, Hath puta spirit of youth in every thing : That heavy Saturs laught and leapt with him.

He has ascertained that Saturn was in opposition on 4th April 1600, 17th April 1601, and 29th April 1602, rising as a bright planet about sunset in the first year, and at a gradually later hour in the Aprils of the two next years. Our choice is really limited to the April of 1600 by two valuable clues to the dates which are contained in the following group of sonnets, 100-126. The first of these is in S. 104, which counts the seasons that had passed since their friendship began: thrice had winter shaken the leaves from the trees, thrice had autumn turned to yellow, thrice had April perfumes burned hot in June. Starting from the spring of 1598, we should now be in the middle of the third winter, 1600-1601. The other clue confirms this, the national event of S. 107:

Not mine own fears nor the prophetic soul

Of the wide world, dreaming on things to come, Can yet the lease of my true love control, Supposed as forfeit to a confin’d doom.

The mortal Moon hath her eclipse endur’d, And the sad Augurs mock their own presage ; Incertainties now crown themselves assur’d, And peace proclaims Olives of endless age.

Now with the drops of this most balmy time My love looks fresh, and death to me subscribes ; Since, spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme, While he insults o’er dull and speechless tribes. And thou in this shalt find thy monument, When tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass are spent.

The Queen, under the figure of the mortal Moon, had endured, or emerged from, an eclipse, and the sad augurs were mocking their own presage. This was the foiled attempt of the Earl of Essex, with a large following of peers, knights, and esquires, to overthrow the Queen’s rule on the 8th February 1601. There had been a notable eclipse the year before, on which Woodhouse’s Almanack for 1601 based a prognostication that its influence would be felt in the State from 20th January 1601 until November. When the rebellion of Essex took place, the populace were so impressed by the closeness of Woodhouse’s prophecy that the Government thought it necessary to call in the copies of the paltry book. There was no other event in Elizabeth’s reign which threatened her in the same way. In the Directions for Preachers, issued in time for the Sunday after the attempt, it was stated : “If he had not been prevented, there had never been a rebellion in England since Richard II. more desperate and dangerous. The rebellion in the North was far off, and thereby not so perilous. The Great Armada of Spain was but a thunderclap, the noise being greater than the danger, and her Majesty’s subjects faithfully united to encounter it.’’ Shakespeare’s ‘‘ own fears,” for his liberty ‘supposed as forfeit to a confined doom,”’ are explained by the fact that some of Essex’s friends went, on the Thursday or Friday before, to the Globe Theatre, and there arranged with Augustine Phillips, Shakespeare’s fellow-actor and friend, to play on the Saturday “the deposing and killing of Richard II.,” and promised to give the actors forty shillings as an inducement to do so, the play being “so old

A DEFINITE DATE, 8TH FEBRUARY 1601 and so long out of use that they should have a small company at it.” Essex’s friends went over the water to see the play, after dining “at Gunter’s”’; the gossip of the day gives the impression that the play they had seen was ‘Henry IV.,’ whereas it was undoubtedly ‘Richard II.’ Phillips was examined before the lawofficers of the Crown. The actors of the Globe probably had their fears, but none of them are included in the lists of those arrested.

Chapter II

In the drama of the Sonnets, as in most dramas, the leading motive is a love-affair, which appears as early as S. 33, and leads to rapid developments and passionate scenes in the last group of sonnets. But the episode of the Rival Poet, which comes between, is also an integral part of the drama, and really more important than the other in its bearing upon Shakespeare’s fortunes.

The first thing is to identify the rival poet. Having done so, we shall find that his identity throws a new light upon the real issue involved. In the nine sonnets upon the rival poet himself, 78-86, there are five clues to his identity, only one of which has been used already, by Boaden, to show that Samuel Daniel was the poet meant. It will be shown that the rivalry was really to gain Lord Herbert’s interest with the Queen in filling up the office of Poet Laureate with its substantial pension, vacant on the death of Spenser.