A new study of the sonnets of Shakespeare

Front matter

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Preface

'X'HE greater part of what is contained in this volume was originally prepared as an informal address to a small circle of friends ; but as it soon became evident that the subject could not be brought within the compass of that mode of communication, the author was induced to change the matter he had in hand into the more formal and deliberate shape of an essay. It would have been better for him, in order to avoid possible repetitions, oversights, and peculiarities of diction not suited to an elaborate treatise, if he had written the whole work over again, but he was warned against that labor by his advancing years, which might add to, instead of decreasing, the defects of his performance.

In submitting the work as it is to the judgment of his readers, the author desires to direct their attention particularly to two things : first, the Method of Investigation, which consists in interpreting the sonnets from their own words almost exclusively, and without recurring to any supposed extraneous incidents iv Preface

in the life of the great poet, of which we know absolutely nothing ; and, second, to the main result of the application of that method, — a division of the sonnets, in which nearlyone half of them are found to relate to the passional experiences of the poet under the different influences of a true and a false affection, while the other half (or a little more than half) are found to relate to his poetic development, — his aspirations, aims, struggles, disappointments, and final successes.

By this means, the sonnets are lifted from a low level of petty concern, — " a cat-and-dog fight," as Butler, a recent commentator, has said, — up to a high point of aesthetic interest and significance. They now present the poet during an early formative period of his career, when he was laying the foundation of his character, and of an artistic skill which has had no parallel.

It is more than possible that in presenting these conclusions I have made some mistakes of detail, either as to the construction I have put upon this sonnet or that, or as to the place I have assigned to it in the general exposition : but such errors are of minor importance ; — and the main question is, whether the principal view at which I have arrived is the correct

Preface v

view or not ; for if it be the correct view, it amounts to a complete revolution in this branch of Shakespearian literature. Let the public decide.

P. G.

New York, June 3, 1900.

Contents

PAGE

Introduction i

I — A Brief History of the Sonnets . . 3 II — Of Former Expositions of the Sonnets 31

PART FIRST A New Study of the Sonnets . . .51

I — A Central and Explanatory Sonnet . 58

II — The Independents or Solitaries . . 65

III — A Plea for Poetic or Creative Art . 67

IV — A Young Love-Time 89

V — The Episode of the Dark Lady . .130 VI — The Poet's Communion with the Higher

Muse • 166

Chapter First. A Brief History Of The Sonnets

A LATE historian of English literature tells us that at one time in the reign of Queen Elizabeth there was an outbreak of sonnet-writing, which for mass and beauty has never been paralleled.^ It was a form of verse which, having long held sway in Italy, passed through France into England, where it became a fashion. Introduced by Wyatt and Surrey about the year 1550, it was taken up by a great many others, and among them by Thomas Watson, whom Spenser calls " the noblest swain that ever piped upon an oaten quill," then by Spenser himself, the foremost poet of his age, and finally by Sir Philip Sidney, who, as scholar and soldier, enjoyed a universal popularity. In the course of time nearly everybody who could write verses at all wrote them in this style ; a dozen different collections of them were published before 1596; and it is estimated that more than two thousand

' A History of English Literature, by George Saintsbury, p. 79.

specimens were in circulation, if not always printed, by the end of the century.

Among those touched by the common impulse, was a young versifier of Stratford-on- Avon, named Shakespeare, who wrote more than 154 poems of the kind, all strictly conformed to the conventional manner, — three quatrains of alternate rhymes, ending in a couplet, — and some of them to the conventional spirit.

Every person of culture who reads the Sonnets nowadays is pleased to find in most of them fertility of thought, beauty of imagery, and mellifluous versification,^ but having read

' With some exceptions : Walter Savage Landor, in spite of his high admiration of the poet, maintains that the Sonnets, while they exhibit intensity and strength of thought, lack the imagination which is his main characteristic {Works, vol. iv., p. 56). Elsewhere, also, Landor (vol. iv., p. 12) remarks that not a single one is very admirable, and few sink very low. " They are hot and pothery with much condensation and delicacy, like a raspberry jam, without cream, crust, or bread, to break its viscosity." Hallam wished that the Sonnets had never been published, but that was on moral not aesthetic grounds. His words are : " There is weakness and folly in all excessive misplaced affection, which is not redeemed by those touches of nobler sentiment that abound in this long series of sonnets. But there are also faults of a merely external nature. The obscurity is often such as only conjecture can penetrate ; the strain of admiration and tenderness would be too monotonous were it less unpleasing ; and so many frigid conceits are scattered around that we might almost fancy the poet to have written without genuine emotion, did not a host of other passages attest the contrary."

them he is at a loss to know precisely what they are all about. Are they, he asks himself, a continuous poem, or so many isolated poems ? Are they autobiographical or dramatic ; or are they poems at all in the proper sense, and not enigmas, concealing under a poetic garb some deep and occult philosophy ? Each of these questions has been answered affirmatively and negatively with equal zeal and ingenuity./ In the complete editions of Shakespeare's Works the editors have tried their hands at solving the several difficulties, but not with much success ; and bulky volumes have been prepared to prove various theories as to their design and significance, which carry no conviction with them beyond the immediate circle of authorship.^

These differences of opinion are largely due to a certain obscurity in the Sonnets themselves : they do not carry their meaning on their face, like the Sonnets of Dante, Petrarch, and other Italian writers which preceded them, or like those of Spenser, Sidney, Drummond, Constable, etc., which were contemporaneous, or, again, like those of Bowles, Keats, Wordsworth, and Mr. and Mrs. Browning, which have

^ See Massey's Shakespeare's Sonnets, Armitage Brown's Shakepeare's Autobiographical Poems, 1838, and others, which, however, I cite at second-hand.

come afterwards. They allude to situations that have now passed entirely out of memory ; they indulge in conceits and plays upon words which rather perplex than help the understanding of them ; and often they admit locutions, which, if not wholly obsolete, are yet very different from our accepted forms. Indeed, in reading them, it sometimes happens that we come upon passages which at first seem clear and intelligible, but which on closer scrutiny, like the face of a dumb man, get indefinite and vague.

Not a little of this obscurity is to be ascribed to the manner in which the Sonnets were introduced to the public, — which was such as not only to render corruptions of the text inevitable, but to suggest many misleading collateral questions. They were first alluded to incidentally in 1598 by one Francis Meres, a Master of Arts in both Universities, and more or less familiar with the literature and literary men of his time. A book of his called Palladis Tamia, or Wifs Treasury, contained a discourse on " Our English Poets Compared with the Greek, Latin, and Italian Poets," wherein he referred to Shakespeare many times, and always in terms of eulogy. " The sweet, witty soul of Ovid," he says, " lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare. Witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, and his sugared sonnets among his private friends."

*' Shakespeare among the English," he goes on to say, ** is excellent in both kinds for the stage : for comedy, witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Comedy of Errors, his Love's Labor 's Lost, his Loves Labor 's Won " (supposed by most critics to have been the original of All 's Well that Ends Well), " his Midstcmmer Night 's Dream,, and his Merchant of Venice ; and for tragedy, his Richard II., his Richard III, his Henry IV., his King fohn, his Titus Andronicus, and his Romeo and Juliet.'' This list, dividing Henry IV. into its two parts, mentions no less than thirteen plays in all, although it does not include the Taming of the Shrew, nor Pericles, commonly referred to this early time.

Whether the "sugared sonnets" spoken of above were the same as those we now have can not be known positively, but it is more than probable that they were. As they are cited in proof of the poet's merit and distinction, along with such writings as the Midsummer Night's Dream, the Merchant of Venice, the two Richards, and King John, it is not at all likely that they would have been allowed to perish.

Besides, there is a strong presumption as to the identity of many of them, raised by a fact which is none the less convincing because it is indirect and casual. In the year 1599, — the year after Meres's allusion, — a book was published called The Passionate Pilgrim^ which contained several poems by Shakespeare and, among the rest, two sonnets, now known as Nos. 138 and 144, the first of which (No. 138) refers to a love adventure in which the lovers are on the most friendly, familiar, and even jocose terms, while the second (No. 144) shows that this relation has been changed into one of suspicion and distrust. The poet is now assured that he has been betrayed by his lady, while he expresses a painful fear of the friend. These sonnets thus disclose an amatory experience, which must have had its beginning, its intermediate incidents, and its result, and are evidently parts of a more extended whole, which whole we find in the Sonnets as they have come down to us. They describe, as we shall see, the personal appearance and accomplishments of the lady, the gradual approaches of the swain, their increasing intimacy, the rise of disturbing suspicions, the poet's complete illusion for a time, and then the final rupture and separation of the parties. The inference, therefore, would seem to be inevitable that these sonnets, at least, were extant before 1599.

The Sonnets, however, were not put forth in book form until the year 1 609 — eleven years after the mention of them by Meres, — when the poet had acquired a greatly increased fame as a playwright, and a widespread curiosity obtained as to what else he miorht have written. Of this curiosity the publishers took advantage, and, looking up everything that purported to be his, gave it to the world. In the case of the sonnets, the successful hunter was one Thomas Thorpe, who was not so much a printer or a publisher as a literary purveyor, and already responsible for some twenty considerable volumes.

Getting possession in some way or another of these sonnets, Mr. T. T. issued them, as a quarto, with this peculiar title : ''Shakespeare s Sonnets, never before imprinted. At London by G. Eld. for T. T.^ and are to be sold by Wm. Apsley, 1609." A few copies read "and are to be sold by John Wright, dwelling at Christ's Church Gate." In addition to the

' This T. T. is identified with Thomas Thorpe by an entry in the Stationers' Register, under date of May 20th.

lo A New Study of

sonnets, this volume contained also a complete poem of considerable length and remarkable beauty, called " The Lovers' Complaint."

If Thorpe had confined his enterprise to the simple issue of the poems he would have rendered us an invaluable service ; but he appears to have been ambitious on his own account and so prefixed to his quarto this dedication :

TO . THE . ONLIE . BEGETTER . OF.

THESE . INSVING . SONNETS .

AND . THAT . ETERNITIE .

PROMISED .

BY .

OVR-EVER-LIVING-POET .

WISHETH .

the well-wishing, adventvrer in

SETTING .

FORTH .

T. T.

This bit of quaintness, in which Mr. Tommy Thorpe tried to show off his wit, has proved to be a perfect mare's nest to the critics, who have found no end of perplexity in its terms. In the first place, they ask, what did Tommy mean by the phrase " the onHe begetter " ? Ordinarily it would mean the author of the sonnets, or the person by whom they were written. But that has not satisfied the mysterymongers, — some of whom contend that the " onlie begetter " was the person by whom they were inspired, or to whom they were addressed, which Is rather a forced use of the words, — to say nothing of the fact that several persons seem to be involved, female as well as male. Others contend that the " onlie begetter " was the person who procured them, or got them together for the printer, — an equally strange locution, just as it would be to say that the lad or lass who furnishes us with strawberries in the summer is the begetter of strawberries.

Then, again, who was Mr. W. H., said to have been this " onlie begetter," and for whom T. T. wishes all happiness and the immortality promised by the ever-living poet? The answers have been almost as many as the writers on the subject. It was, says one, the Earl of Southampton, an early friend and patron of the poet, the initials of whose family name, Henry Wriothesley, are simply reversed ; no, says another, it was the young Earl of Pembroke, who was also an intimate friend of the bard ; not at all, exclaims a third, it was

William Hart, a nephew of the poet, mentioned in his will, and who probably purloined the copy ; or, more likely, adds a fourth, William Hathaway, his brother-in-law, who had access to his papers ; or, finally, it was one William Hughes, plainly referred to in line 7, Sonnet 20, although nobody has ever yet discovered who William Hughes might happen to have been.

I shall not discuss these various wranglings further than to say that, in my guess, which is as good as another's, Mr. Tommy Thorpe, having read a deal in the early sonnets about begetting "a son," and also in the later sonnets about one Mr. Will, — a pun on the author's name, — and desiring at the same time to be quaint and funny for himself, put the two together in order to tell us how the exclusive author ("the onlie begetter") was no other than W. H. (Will Himself), or the veritable Master William Shakespeare. He resorted to this device, no doubt, in the hope thereby of averting the wrath of the poet, whose wares he had surreptitiously acquired and given to the public.

Thorpe's dedication was really of no moment in itself, or as a help to the interpretation of the poems. It was a little trick of his own, to further his own purposes, perhaps to excite a curiosity which might promote the sale of his book. It was an habitual practice of publishers of the time to affix dedications to their works, confined to initial letters merely, such as Mr. O. S., Mr. B. W., Mr. R. L., etc., and among them Mr. W. H. was a good deal in favor. There are several books of this sort still extant and notably a collection of pious poems by one Southwell, a Jesuit, who wishes his patron, Mr. W. H., a long life and the achievement of all his desires.^

Thorpe's Quarto, however, as it is our onlyauthority for the sonnets, is exceedingly important, and at once suggests several inquiries that ought to be determined before we proceed to their interpretation. The first of these relates to

I. Their Attthenticity and Correctness.

That the poems were written by Shakespeare admits of no doubt. They were in circulation privately, according to Meres, for nearly twenty years during his lifetime, and much discussed among his friends. They were published seven years before he died, and attracted a great deal of attention because of his growing fame as a

' See Lee's Life of Shakespeare, p. 400.

playwright. Yet no one of his contemporaries, so far as we can learn, ever questioned their origin. Within twenty years after his decease, while many of his friends were still alive, they were republished, and, as the writer of an introduction said, " with the same purity that the author when living avouched." It was reserved for the long-eared quidnuncs of the present century, who invented the Baconian nonsense, to raise even the thinnest mist of a doubt on the subject. One of these ^ insists that they were written by any one of a half-dozen wits of the time, provided it was not Shakespeare ; and another has dug up for the authorship a mastodon as big as the latest dinosaurus of Wyoming.^ He maintains, in the face of the most positive, various, and well-authenticated historical evidence, — contemporary opinion, the witness of " comrades " and intimate friends, the records of books still extant, and many of the most convincing incidental confirmations, — that " the Sonnets were not written by Shakespeare, but were written to him as the patron or friend of the poet ; that while Shakespeare

' See Hamlet's iVoh'-Book, by William D. O'Connor (Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1885).

* Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems, by Jesse Johnson. G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1899.

might have had something to do with some of the plays," their real author was " * a great poet,' ' a dreamy and transforming Genius,' [sic] who wrought in and for them that which is imperishable, and so wrought although he was to have no part in their fame and perhaps but a small financial recompense " ; and that "it is the loves, griefs, fears, forebodings, and sorrows of the student and recluse, thus circumstanced and confined, that the Sonnets portray."^ "Wonderful, wonderful!" as Celia exclaims, and then again " most wonderful ! " Let us only admit the exceedingly natural and simple supposition that the greatest poet of the ages, who "lived for sixtyfive or seventy years in London," during one of the most inquisitive as well as enlightened periods of history, and whose works made an epoch in the annals of literature, never revealed himself in any other way to man, woman, or child that we know of, not even by name, — let us admit that small assumption, and the Sonnets are " no longer mysterious or inexplicable." Their author may be the unparalleled Ignotus of all time, but they are as translucent as Mother Goose.

But while Shakespeare was the writer of the

' Johnson, page 3, but see also p. 92.

Sonnets, he had nothing to do with their publication. The very form of the title-page, Shakespeare s Sonnets, is proof positive of this. All his other works — the narrative poems and the early quartos — are said to be " by William Shakespeare," which is the customary and prescriptive style of an author who ventures on his own account. Besides, the Quarto, as printed, abounds in typographical and other errors which might easily have escaped the eyes of a proof-reader, but not those of the writer himself. Thus, for example, in Sonnet 48, their is put for thy no less than four times, making nonsense of the verse; Sonnet 126 wants the final couplet, which is indicated by parentheses, thus ( ), an obvious expedient of a printer, but not of an author ; again, in Sonnet 144, the second line repeats the close of the first line, making bad sense as well as bad measure, which could not have eluded the writer ; and No. 145 is not a Sonnet at all, but a bit of octosyllabic doggerel, which a writer of Shakespeare's judgment would not have retained in the collection. As the poems issued under his own auspices, like the Venus and Adonis and the Lttcrece, have few typographical faults, we have a right to conclude that the Sonnets, which are full of them, could not have had the benefit of his supervision.

2. The Order of Arrangement.

The order in which the Sonnets are printed in the Quarto has been thought by many of great importance, though I do not myself see why the sequence of the subject-matter should depend upon the numerical sequence. A poet, writing in a commonplace-book from day to day, might treat of one theme to-day and of another to-morrow, as his mood suggested, and yet number his pieces consecutively, without implying any connection between them. Indeed, whole weeks might intervene in which he would be absorbed in different topics, without recurring to any particular one. Shakespeare's Sonnets read, on the first view, as if they had been written in this piecemeal way. - Ninety-nine out of a hundred readers would say of them at once with Mr. Grant White, that as they stand "they are distractingly and remedilessly confused." None the less Professor Dowden insists that they now stand as first written. " Repeated readings have convinced me," he says, " that the sonnets stand in the right order, sonnet connected with sonnet " ; yet he immediately recognizes a grand break at No.

126, and several smaller intermediate breaks which he calls renvoi} The connections he finds between consecutive sonnets are often so forced and remote that one can hardly think that he takes himself seriously. In fact, he does distrust his own discernment, and " freely warns the reader " that he has perhaps, in some instances, fancied points of connection which have no real existence. But there is no " perhaps " about it : in several instances he lugs them in together by the head and shoulders or by main force. I cannot for the life of me discern the affinities that appear to have been patent to him between the i8th and 19th, the 19th and 20th, and so on up to the 33d ; or between the 34th and 35th, and the 37th and 38th, and so on to the 45th ; or between the 49th and 50th, and so on up to the 56th ; or between the 58th and 59th, and so on to the 65th ; and I might cite dozens of others, in which it is as difficult to find any relativity as it would be to find a needle in a haystack. Groups of sonnets show themselves every, where, as we shall afterwards see, but between them are gaps which, if " not so deep as a well nor so wide as a church door," are enough.

* The Sonnets of Willia?n Shakespeare. By Edward Dowden. New York, Appleton & Co., 1887.

It is significant that in the earhest edition of the Sonnets after the Quarto — that of 1640 — no attention whatever is paid to the order ; the poems are distributed as the editor pleases, and generally in clusters under particular titles ; and that edition is followed by Gildon, Sewell, Lintot, and other editors of the eighteenth century. More recently, Knight, one of the most intelligent and judicious of judges, departs widely from the accepted order, whenever he wishes to illustrate what he considers subjects that ought to be grouped, — jumping ad Itbitzcm from No. 18 to No. 90, from No. 22 to No. 1 10, then back again to No. 62, etc. In this freedom he is followed by Hudson, who arranges the poems in zigzags, — going from No. 18 to No. 55, from No. 21 to No. 139, and from No. 126 to No. 22. It is needless to add that all the more elaborate commentators, especially those who have written great books about them, feel themselves warranted in adapting the order of the poems to the exigencies of their theories.

My own notion is, that when Shakespeare wrote the sonnets in his table books he numbered them in the order in which they were written, without reference to their connections of theme; and afterwards, when he copied them or allowed them to be copied for circulation among his friends, he adhered to the same desultory arrangement, with the exception perhaps that to one sonnet he affixed an especial number for purposes of elucidation which I shall hereafter point out.

3. The Date of Composition.

A more Important point, in fact a vital one in this inquiry, is the time at which the sonnets were composed. Were they all, or the most of them, in existence in 1597 when Meres alludes to them as circulating from hand to hand ? or were they still comparatively new when they were put into book form by Thorpe in 1609? Dowden,^ summing up the prevailing opinion about them, says that " the general characteristics of the style lead us to believe that some of the sonnets, as, for example, Nos. 1-17, belong to a period not later than Romeo and Juliet " (which would be, taking the earliest edition of that play, about 1591, or, taking the later edition, about 1597), "while others, as Nos. 64-74, seem to echo the sadder tones heard in Hamlet and Measii7^e for Measure " (which would be for both about 1602-3).^ " I

' Sonnets, Introduction, p. xliv.

2 That is, after Much Ado, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, All 'j Well, Othello, and Lear, can not think," he goes on to say, "that any of the sonnets are eadier than Daniel's Delia (1592), which I beheve supphed Shakespeare with a model of this form of verse ^ ; and though I can allege no strong evidence for the opinion, I should not be disposed to place any later than 1605." Boas agrees in the main with this conclusion, putting the sonnets after the narrative poems, i. e., after 1594;^ and George Brandes, in a still more recent work,^ fixes the date about 1601, which would be after Shakespeare had written the thirteen plays ascribed to him by Meres, and added to them Henry V., Julius Ccesar^ the first draft of Hamlet^ and those unsurpassed comedies. Much Ado^ As You Like It, and Twelfth Night. He was then in the thirty-seventh year of his age, of prosperous fortunes, of wide renown as an author, and held in the highest esteem as a man by " divers of worship." "^ In fact, he had been noted for several years already, not only for " his facetious grace in writing,

' Daniel most likely came after Shakespeare as a writer of sonnets.

^ Shakespeare and His Predecessors, by F. L. Boas. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1896.

^ William Shakespeare : A Critical Study, By George Brandes. The Macmillan Co., i8g8.

'^ Chettle's Kind-Harte' s Dreame, 1592.

but for his civil and excellent demeanor, and uprightness of dealing."

All of these gentlemen shot wide of their mark : the Sonnets were of much earlier date than they suppose; and the proof of it is "those general characteristics of style," on which Mr. Dowden relies.^

(i) While some of them are crude enough, as Hudson says, "to have been the handiwork of a smart schoolboy," they have all of them more or less marks of immaturity. The most conspicuous of these are the identical and bad rhymes in which they abound, such as "moment" and " comment," " decrease " and "increase," "open" and "broken," "astronomy" and "quality," "key" and "survey," and a great many others no less abominable, which a practised writer could have easily avoided. I might add, too, as showing youthfulness and want of skill, that the thought is so often greatly in advance of the power to express it ; ,or, an ambition of aim not carried out by the execution; but why resort to these rather dispu-

' The only writer who has fixed upon an early date is Samuel Butler, whose work, printed after this chapter was written, assigns the writing of the sonnets to the period between 1585 and 1588, but, as he carries his pretensions so far as to name not only the month but the part oi the month in which each sonnet was written, he gives a sort of ludicrousness and absurdity to the whole subject.

table indications of style, when so many of the sonnets themselves declare directly or by inevitable inference that they are the work of an inexperienced hand ? Take, for example. No. 16, one of a series of seventeen sonnets, in which the writer describes his pen as a " pupilpen," or a pen not yet a master of its art ; or No. 25, which presents its author as in humble circumstances, and quite unknown to the public ; or No. 29, in which he speaks of himself as neither a favorite of fortune, nor of public opinion, but an outcast from both ; envying the better positions, and desiderating the qualities which he does not possess ; or No. 32, in which he depreciates his verse as rude and easily outstripped by that of other writers ; or Nos. 33 and 34, lamenting the disappointments of his career, which once promised well but is now covered over by clouds ; or No. 36, which complains that he is made tame or is disabled as a writer by the intense enmity of fortune ; or No. 38, which confesses that the efforts of his Muse are of slight effect and not acceptable to the taste of his day ; or No. 69, which complains that his merely external accomplishments are appreciated, while his finer qualities are overlooked or disparaged ; or No. 72, which tells that the poet is really ashamed of what he brings forth, and that it has nothing of excellence in it ; or No. 80, which claims for his lines no merit but the simple merit of sincerity of sentiment ; or No. 88, which deplores that he is full of faults and weaknesses; and others, like the iioth, iiith, 1 1 7th, in which he accuses himself of having wandered away from truth and beauty to court popular favor by appeals to a low public sentiment. Assuredly, such things could have been said by Shakespeare of himself only in his callow days — when he was still struggling with his youthful limitations, and before he had attained a full consciousness of his higher powers.