Shakespeare's sonnets

Preface

This is practically a new book, the critical matter in my former edition of the Sonnets (published in 1883, and somewhat revised and enlarged in subsequent years) having been mostly rewritten and considerably augmented. So far as I am aware, it is the first thoroughly annotated edition that has appeared in this country. The American editors of Shakespeare's works, like the great majority of those in England, have given less attention to the poems than to the plays ; and the only separate English editions of the Sonnets (including both text and commentary) worth mentioning are those of Dowden, Tyler, and Wyndham (in his Poems of Shakespeare). Many books about the So?inets have been published on both sides of the Atlantic, the majority of which, to my thinking, are chiefly notable for their fanciful theories of the origin and significance of the poems. For a full bibliography of these books, and also of the German literature of the subject (down to 1881, when it appeared), Dowden's larger edition may be consulted. For the critical student, as I said in my former edition, his careful resume answers a double purpose : as a bibliography, directing him to the books and papers on the subject, if he is moved to read any or all of them ; and as a compact and convenient substitute for these books and papers, if he wants to know their gist and substance without the drudgery of wading through them. I doubt not that the majority of students will be thankful that Dowden has relieved them of the drudgery by compressing many a dull volume or magazine article into a page or a paragraph.

My indebtedness to Dowden, Tyler, and Wyndham is duly acknowledged in the introduction and the notes. My own work must pass for what it may seem to be worth. A few questions, at least, I feel sure that I have definitely settled : for instance, that Shakespeare could not have supervised or authorized the publication of the Sonnets ; and that the date (and consequently the interpretation) of Sonnet 144 has been misunderstood by every former editor and commentator. Whether I have proved that the order of the first series (1-126) is not strictly chronological, and that some of them were addressed to a woman, the reader must decide for himself ; and also whether he will endorse my criticisms of Mr. Sidney Lee's views concerning the identity of "Mr. W. H." and of the " rival poet," and sundry minor questions.

I have given special attention to Mr. Lee's theories of the Sonnets, partly because he has developed and defended them at such length in his Life of Shakespeare (quite out of proportion to the space allotted to other controverted questions of importance), and partly because his book is, in most other respects, so scholarly and authoritative. As in all cases where I disagree with other authors, I have endeavoured to state Mr. Lee's opinions and arguments fairly — generally in his own words — and as fully as the space at my command would permit.

In the partial revision of my former edition (1890) I was inclined, with many careful critics, to accept Mr. Tyler's ingenious and plausible identification of the " dark lady " with Mary Fitton ; and the more so after critical friends who had visited Gawsworth to examine the statue of Mary on the family monument, had assured me that the remnants of paint on the stone indicated that she was really a " dark lady," as Tyler had asserted. But her portraits (see p. 32 below) prove that she was a blonde rather than a brunette, and the colours on the statue, if originally true to nature, must have darkened with the lapse of centuries.

Introduction to Shakespeare's Sonnets

The Early Editions

Their History and Interpretation .

I. Was the Edition of 1600 authorized or supervised

by Shakespeare ?

II. Are the Sonnets Autobiographical ?

III. To whom is the Dedication addressed, and what

does it Mean ?

IV. Are All the Sonnets addressed to Two Persons ? V. Concerning the Order of the Sonnets

VI. Who was " Mr. W. H." ? .

VII. The Date of the Sonnets .

VIII. Who was the "Rival Poet"?

IX. Other Theories of the Sonnets X. Conclusions ....

Shakespeare's Sonnets Notes ....

The Sonnets and the Baconian Theory .

Was Barnabe Barnes the " Rival Poet " ?

Index of Words and Phrases Explained

PAGE 9

9 II

II 13 19

25 29

37 43 43

47 141

250 256

Henry Wriothesley

INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS

The Early Editions

The Sonnets were first published in 1609, with the following title-page (as given in the fac-simile of 1870):

SHAKE-SPEARES | Sonnets. | Neuer before Imprinted. I at London | By G. Eld for 7. 1. and are | to be solde by William Asfiley. | 1609.

io Shakespeare's Sonnets

In some copies the latter part of the imprint reads : "to be solde by John Wright, dwelling | at Christ Church gate. | 1609."

At the end of the volume A Lover's Complaint was printed.

In 1640 the Sonnets (except Nos. 18, 19, 43, 56, 75, 76, 96, and 126), rearranged under various titles, with the pieces in The Passionate Pilgrim, A Lover's Complaint, The Phoenix and the Turtle, the lines " Whyshould this a desert be," etc. (A. Y. L. iii. 2. 133 fol.), " Take, O take those lips away," etc. {M, for M. iv. 1. 1 fol.), and sundry translations from Ovid, evidently not Shakespeare's, were published with the following title :

POEMS : I Written | by | Wil. Shake-speare. | Gent. I Printed at London by Tho. Cotes, and are | to be sold by Lohn Benson, dwelling in | S* Dunstans Church-yard. 1640.

There is an introductory address " To the Reader " by Benson, in which he asserts that the poems are " of the same purity the Authour himselfe then living avouched," and that they will be found " seren, cleere and eligantly plaine." He adds that by bringing them " to the perfect view of all men " he is " glad to be serviceable for the continuance of glory to the deserved Author."

The order of the poems in this volume is followed in the editions of Gildon (17 10) and of Sewell (1725 and 1728); also in those published by Ewing (1771) and

Introduction n

Evans (1775). In all these editions the sonnets mentioned above (18, 19, etc.) are omitted, and 138 and 144 are given in the form in which they appear in The Passionate Pilgrim.

The first complete reprint of the Sonnets, after the edition of 1609, appears to have been in the collected edition of Shakespeare's Poems, published by Lintott in 1709.

The earliest known reference to the Sonnets is in the Palladis Tamia of Meres, who speaks of them as " his sugred Sonnets among his priuate friends." This was in 1598, and the next year two of them (138 and 144) were printed in The Passionate Pilgrim. We do not know that any of the others were published before 1609.

Their History and Interpretation

There are many questions concerning the history and interpretation of the Sonnets over which editors, commentators, and critics have wrangled, and over some of which they will doubtless continue to wrangle to the last syllable of recorded time.

I. Was the Edition of 1609 authorized or supervised by Shakespeare ? — Some editors have answered the question in the negative, but the reasons given for the decision are far from conclusive. The fact that the dedication is the publisher's, not the author's, has, for instance, been cited ; but there are those who tell us that the poet, for certain reasons, chose to hide behind

Master Thorpe. Dowden, who summarizes the entire literature of the subject in the introduction to his larger edition of the Sonnets, says " there is reason to believe " that the edition of 1609 had "neither the superintendence nor the consent of the author ; " but the only reason he gives for this opinion — and presumably the best he could offer — is that the book, "though not carelessly printed, is far less accurate than the Venits and Adonis ." That poem and the Luc7"ece are the only works of Shakespeare that he himself appears to have seen through the press. Both are carefully printed for that day, and the Lucrece at least, as the variations in copies of the first edition clearly prove, was corrected by the author while on the press. Both, moreover, contain formal dedications signed with his name.

The 1609 edition of the Sonnets, on the other hand, abounds in errors of the type, most of which Shakespeare could not have failed to detect if he had supervised the printing. He was pretty certainly in London in 1609, and if he allowed these " sugred sonnets " to be printed at all, he would surely have seen that they were printed well.

The question, however, is definitely settled (as I was the first to point out) by one little peculiarity in the printing of the 126th Sonnet, if sonnet it may be called. It has only twelve lines, and Thorpe (or his editor), assuming that a couplet had been lost, completed the normal fourteen lines by two blank ones enclosed in marks of parenthesis ; thus : —

Shakespeare could not have done this, and Thorpe would not have done it if he had been in communication with Shakespeare. In that case he would have asked the poet for the couplet he supposed to be missing, and would have been told that nothing was missing. The piece is not an imperfect sonnet of Shakespeare's pattern, but is made up of six rhymed couplets, and the sense is apparently complete.

There is another fact that may have a bearing upon this question. The final couplet of the 96th Sonnet is the same as that of the 36th. The lines do not fit the later poem as well as they do the earlier one. Possibly, as Dowden suggests, the manuscript of the 96th may have been imperfect, and Thorpe, or his editor, filled it out as well as he could with a couplet from another Sonnet. Of course he would not have done this if the book had been printed with the author's knowledge or consent.

If Shakespeare had nothing to do, directly or indirectly, with the publication of the Sonnets, the fact has some important bearings, as we shall see further on.

II. Are the Sonnets Autobiographical? — Are the Sonnets, wholly or in part, autobiographical, or are they merely " poetical exercises " dealing with imaginary persons and experiences ? This is the question to which all others relating to the poems are secondary and subordinate.

For myself, I firmly believe that the great majority of the Sonnets, to quote what Wordsworth says of them, " express Shakespeare's own feelings in his own person ; " or, as he says in his sonnet on the sonnet, " with this same key Shakespeare unlocked his heart." Browning, quoting this, asks : " Did Shakespeare ? If so, the less Shakespeare he ! " to which Swinburne replies, " No whit the less like Shakespeare, but undoubtedly the less like Browning."

The theory that the Sonnets are mere exercises of fancy, " the free outcome of a poetic imagination," as Delius phrases it, is easy and specious at first, but lands us at last among worse perplexities than it evades. That Shakespeare, for example, should write seventeen sonnets urging a young man to marry and perpetuate his family is strange enough, but that he should select such a theme as the fictitious basis for seventeen sonnets is stranger yet ; and the same may be said of the story or stories apparently underlying other of the poems. Some critics, indeed, who take them to be thus artificially inspired, have been compelled to regard them as " satirical " — intended to ridicule the sonneteers of the time, especially Drayton and Sir John Davies of Hereford. Others, like Professor Minto, who believe the first 126 to be personal, regard the rest as " exercises of skill, undertaken in a spirit of wanton defiance and derision of commonplace." The poems, to quote Dowden, " are in the taste of the time ; less extravagant and less full of conceits than many other Elizabethan collec-

Introduction

'5 tions, more distinguished by exquisite imagination and all that betokens genuine feeling. . . . All that is quaint or contorted or ' conceited ' in them can be paralleled from passages of early plays of Shakespeare, such as Romeo and Juliet, and the Two Gentle??ien of Verona, where assuredly no satirical intention is discoverable."

If the Sonnets were mostly written before 1598 when Meres refers to them, or 1599 when Jaggard printed two of them, or in 1 593 and 1 594, as Sidney Lee assumes, and if most of them, as the same critic believes, were " little more than professional trials of skill, often of superlative merit, to which the poet deemed himself challenged by the efforts of contemporary practitioners," it is passing strange that Shakespeare should not have published them ten or fifteen years before they were brought out by the pirate Thorpe. He must have written them for publication if that was their character, and the extraordinary popularity of his earlier poems would have insured them a favourable reception with the public. His fellow-townsman and friend, Richard Field, who had published the Venus and Adonis in 1593 and the Lucrece in 1594, and who must have known of the circulation of the sonnets in manuscript, would have urged him to publish them ; or, if the author had declined to have them printed, some pirate, like Jaggard or Thorpe, would have done it long before 1609. Mr. Lee tells us that Sidney, Watson, Daniel, and Constable circulated their sonnets for a time in manuscript, but he tells us also that the pirates generally got hold of them and published them within a few years if the authors did not do it. But the history of The Passionate Pilgrim shows that it was not so easy to obtain copies of Shakespeare's sonnets for publication. It was the success of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece (the fourth edition of the former being issued in 1599, and the second of the latter in 1598) which prompted Jaggard to compile The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599 ; and it is a significant fact that he was able to rake together only ten poems which can possibly be Shakespeare's, and three of these were from Love's Labour 's Lost, which had been published in 1598. To these ten pieces he added ten others (eleven, as ordinarily printed) which he impudently called Shakespeare's, though we know that most of them were stolen and can trace some of them to the authors. His book bears evidence in its very make-up that he was hard pushed to fill the pages and give the purchaser a tolerable sixpence-worth. The matter is printed on but one side of the leaf, and is further spun out by putting a head-piece and tail-piece on every page, so that a dozen lines of text sandwiched between these convenient pictorial devices make as fair a show as double the quantity would ordinarily present.

Note, however, that, with all his pickings and stealings, Jaggard managed to secure but two of the sonnets, though a considerable number of them were probably in existence among the author's " private friends," as Meres expressed it a year before. The pirate New-

Introduction iy

man, in 1591, was able to print one hundred and eight sonnets by Sidney which had been circulated in manuscript, and to add to them twenty-eight by Daniel without the author's knowledge ; and sonnets by Watson and Constable, as Mr. Lee tells us, were similarly circulated and pirated. How, then, are we to explain the fact that Jaggard could obtain only two of Shakespeare's sonnets, five years or more after they had been circulating among his friends ? Is it not evident that the poems must have been carefully guarded by these friends on account of their personal and private character ? A dozen more of those sonnets would have filled out Jaggard's " larcenous bundle of verse," and have obviated the necessity of pilfering from Barnfield, Griffin, Marlowe, and the rest; but at the time they were in such close confidential keeping that he could get no copies of them. In the course of years they were shown to a larger and larger number of " private friends," and with the multiplication of copies the chances of their getting outside of that confidential circle were proportionally increased. We need not be surprised, then, that a decade later somebody had succeeded in obtaining copies of them all, and sold the collection to Thorpe.

Even if we suppose that the Sonnets had been impersonal, and that Shakespeare for some reason that we cannot guess had wished to withhold them from the press, we may be sure that he could not have done it in that day of imperfect copyright restrictions. Nothing could have kept a hundred and fifty poems by so popular an author out of print if there had not been strong personal reasons for maintaining their privacy. At least seven editions of the Venus and Adonis and four of the Lucrece appeared before Thorpe was able to secure " copy " for his edition of the Sonnets.

If, as Mr. Lee asserts, Southampton was the patron to whom twenty that may be called " dedicatory " sonnets (23, 26, 32, 37, 38, 69, 77-86, 100, 101, 103, and 106) are addressed, it is all the more remarkable that Shakespeare should not have published them, or, if he hesitated to do it, that his noble patron should not have urged it. He had already dedicated both the Venus and Adonis and the Lucrece to Southampton ; and Mr. Lee says that " three of the twenty dedicatory sonnets [26, 32, 38] merely translate into the language of poetry the expressions of devotion which had already done duty in the dedicatory epistle in verse that precedes Lucrece.'''' Other sonnet-sequences of the time (including the four mentioned by Mr. Lee as pirated while circulated in manuscript, except Sidney's, which were not thus published until after his death) were brought out by their authors, with dedications to noble lords or ladies. Shakespeare's Sonnets, so far as I am aware, are the only exception to the rule.

Mr. Lee himself admits that "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 ; " and elsewhere he recognizes in them more " intensity" than appears in the earlier poems except in "occasional utterances" of Lua-ece ; but, for all that, he would have us believe that they are not personal, and that their " superior and more evenly sustained energy is to be attributed, not to the accession of power that comes with increase of years, but to the innate principles of the poetic form, and to metrical exigencies which impelled the sonneteer to aim at a uniform condensation of thought and language." I cannot help agreeing with those who regard their personal character as no " illusion," and who believe that they clearly show the increase of power which comes with years, their true date probably being 1597-98 rather than 1593-94.

For myself, I could as soon believe the penitential psalms of David to be purely rhetorical and fictitious as the 129th Sonnet, than which no more remorseful utterance was ever wrung from a soul that had tasted the ashes to which the Sodom-apples of illicit love are turned in the end. Have we there nothing but the " admirable fooling " of the actor masquerading in the garb of the penitent, or the satirist mimicking the conceits and affectations of the sonneteers of the time ? If this is supposed to be the counterfeit of feeling, I can only exclaim with Leonato in Much Ado, " O God ! counterfeit ! There was never counterfeit of passion came so near the life of passion ! "

III. TO WHOM IS THE DEDICATION ADDRESSED, AND

what does it mean ? — If Shakespeare had nothing to do with Thorpe's venture, the dedication is Thorpe's own, as it purports to be. But in what sense was " Mr. W. H.," whoever he may have been, " the onlie begetter " of the Sonnets ? " Begetter " may mean either the person to whom the poems owed their birth and to whom they were originally addressed, or the one who collected and arranged them for Thorpe. The majority of critics take the word in the former and more familiar sense, while the minority cite examples of the other meaning from writers of the time and argue plausibly for its adoption here. Both explanations have their difficulties, but the first seems on the whole the more probable. The choice between them does not of necessity affect the opinions we may form concerning the origin, the order, or the significance of the Sonnets. Who " Mr. W. H." was critics will probably never agree in deciding ; but if he was not the editor of the book of 1609, it had an editor about whom we know with certainty neither more nor less than we know about " Mr. W. H."

The vital question concerning the unknown editor is whether he was in the confidence of either the writer of the sonnets or the person or persons to or for whom they were written. If he was not, his arrangement of the poems is not an authoritative one ; and that he was not is evident from the fact that he did not, and presumably could not, ask either the author or the addressee of the 126th Sonnet for that supposed lost couplet. Neither author nor addressee having been privy to the publication of the poems, neither would have assisted the piratical editor or publisher in arranging them for the press.

Dr. Furnivall, in a private note, says he has no doubt that the insertion of the marks of parenthesis " was the printer's doings ; " and Mr. Thomas Tyler, in his edition of the Somiets (London, 1890), expresses the same opinion ; but it is extremely improbable that the printer would resort to this extraordinary typographical expedient (absolutely unprecedented, so far as my observation goes) without consulting the publisher, and Thorpe would not have consented to it if he could have avoided it. It is clear that printer or publisher, or both, considered that something was evidently wanting which could not be supplied and must be accounted for.

Dr. Furnivall also says that the supposed " editor " is "an imaginary being." He is in nowise essential to the theory. If anybody chooses to regard Thorpe as his own editor, be it so. Whether he arranged the poems as we find them in his edition or somebody else arranged them for him does not matter. In either case, he simply did the work as well as he could from what he knew of the history of the poems or could learn from a study of them.

The editor, as we will call him, though not in the confidence of the persons directly concerned, had evidently become deeply interested in the poems, and spent much time and labour in making a collection of them.

In the course of the ten years or more previous to 1609, he had gathered in the 154, which he sorted and arranged for publication. Those urging a friend to marry were easily picked out ; and this group of seventeen, as the largest — or, perhaps, as that in which the connection would be most obvious to the average reader — he placed first. As to the arrangement of the other groups he had made, he doubtless had his own theory, based, we may suppose, on facts better known or more accessible then than now ; but he had not all the information he needed for doing the work with absolute accuracy. After arranging the first 126, or all that he regarded as addressed to "Mr. W. H." or the poet's male friend, he appended those written to the " dark lady," as he supposed — apparently without any attempt at regular order, except in a few small groups readily made up — and, having added the two Cupid sonnets, handed the whole collection to Thorpe for printing.

IV. Are all the Sonnets addressed to two Persons ? — It is hardly possible that certain of the sonnets in the second group (127-152) were really addressed to the " dark lady," — 129, for instance, though it may have been suggested by his relations with her, and 146, which seems to be entirely independent of that entanglement.

It is also very doubtful whether certain sonnets in the first group (1-126) properly belong there. Some of them appear to have been addressed to a woman rather than a man — for instance, 97, 98, 99, etc. Of course everybody familiar with the literature of that time knows, as Dyce remarks, that " it was then not uncommon for one man to write verses to another in a strain of such tender affection as fully warrants us in terming them amatory." Many of Shakespeare's sonnets which he addressed to his young friend are of this character, and were it not for internal evidence to the contrary might be supposed to be addressed to a woman. But Sonnets 97, 98, and 99 could hardly have been w r ritten to a male friend even in that day. Look at 99, for example : —

"The forward violet thus did I chide: Sweet thief, whence didst thou steal thy sweet that smells, If not from my love's breath ? The purple pride Which on thy soft cheek for complexion dwells In my love's veins thou hast too grossly dyed. The lily I condemned for thy hand, And buds of marjoram had stolen thy hair ; The roses fearfully on thorns did stand, One blushing shame, another white despair ; A third, nor red nor white, had stolen of both, And to his robbery had annex'd thy breath ; But, for his theft, in pride of all his growth A vengeful canker eat him up to death.

More flowers I noted, yet I none could see But sweet or colour it had stolen from thee."

If this sonnet were met with where we had no external evidence that it was addressed to a man, could we have a moment's hesitation in deciding that it must be addressed to a woman ? Even in Elizabethan times, when extravagant eulogies of manly beauty were so common, do we find the poet dwelling upon his " love's breath " or the " lily " whiteness of his hand ? From first to last, the sweetness and loveliness described in the verses are unmistakably feminine.

I find a curious parallel to this sonnet in one of Constable's (9th of 1 st Decade), published in 1594 1 : —

" My Lady's presence makes the Roses red, Because to see her lips they blush for shame. The Lily's leaves, for envy, pale became, And her white hands in them this envy bred. The Marigold the leaves abroad doth spread ; Because the sun's and her power is the same. The Violet of purple colour came, Dyed in the blood she made my heart to shed. In brief. All flowers from her their virtue take ; From her sweet breath, their sweet smells do proceed ; The living heat which her eyebeams doth make Warmeth the ground, and quickeneth the seed. The rain, wherewith she watereth the flowers, Falls from mine eyes, which she dissolves in showers."

Reference to the lily hands and sweet breath of women are frequent in the Elizabethan sonnets, but I have noted nothing of the kind in the sonnets addressed to men.

There are several other of Shakespeare's sonnets in

1 Whether it was one of the smaller number of Sonnets printed in 1592 I do not know. From its position in the first ten in the Diana of 1594 I should infer that it was ; but there can be little doubt that it was earlier than Shakespeare's.

Introduction this group (1-126) which may or may not be addressed to women ; the internal evidence does not settle the question beyond a doubt. Our editor, if he thought of the question (which is unlikely, as it does not appear to have occurred to him in connection with the 99th), gave them the benefit of the doubt and included them in this group.

V. Concerning the Order of the Sonnets. — Moreover, certain sonnets in the first group appear to be out of place, though many of the editors attempt to prove that the order of the series is Shakespeare's own. But if the 70th Sonnet is addressed to the same person as 33-35 (to say nothing of 40-42) it seems to be clearly out of place. Here the poet says : —

" That thou art blamed shall not be thy defect, For slander's mark zuas ever yet the fair ; The ornament of beauty is suspect, A crow that flies in heaven's sweetest air. So thou be good, slander doth but approve Thy worth the greater, being woo'd of time ; For canker vice the sweetest buds doth love, And thou present'st a pure unstained prime. Thou hast pass'd by the ambush of young days, Either not assaiVd or victor being charged ; Yet this thy praise cannot be so thy praise To tie up envy evermore enlarg'd."