V

THE YEAR 1601-THE SONNETS AND PEMBROKE

THE turning-point in Shakespeare's prevailing mood must be placed in or about the year 1601. We naturally looked for one source of his henceforth deepening melancholy in outward events, in the political drama which in that year reached its crisis and catastrophe; but it is still more imperative that we should look into his private and personal experiences for the ultimate cause of the revolution in his soul. We must therefore inquire what light his works throw upon his private circumstances and state of mind during this fateful year.

Now, we find among Shakespeare's works one which, more than any other, enables us to look into his inmost soul; and this work, as the latest and most penetrating of his students and critics have established, must date from about 1601-I mean his Sonnets. It is to these remarkable poems that we must mainly address ourselves for the information we require. Public events may, indeed, cast a certain measure of light or shadow over a man's inward world of thought and feeling; but they are never the efficient factors in determining the happiness or melancholy of his fundamental mood. If he has personal reasons for feeling that fate is against him, the utmost serenity in the political atmosphere will not dissipate his gloom; and, conversely, if a deep joy abides within him, and he has personal reasons for feeling himself favoured by fortune, then public discontent will be powerless to disturb the harmony in his soul. But his depression will, of course, be doubly severe if public events and private experiences combine to cast a gloom over his mind.

Shakespeare's "sugred Sonnets" are first mentioned in the well-known passage in Meres's Palladis Tamia (1598), where they are spoken of as passing from hand to hand "among his private friends." In the following year the two important Sonnets

now numbered cxxxviii. and cxliv. were printed (with readings subsequently revised) in a collection of poems named The Passionate Pilgrim, dishonestly published, and falsely attributed to Shakespeare, by a bookseller named Jaggard. For the next ten years we find no mention of Sonnets by Shakespeare, until, in 1609, a bookseller named Thomas Thorpe issued a quarto book entitled Shakespeares Sonnets. Neuer before Imprinted-an edition which the poet himself certainly cannot have revised for the press, but which may possibly have been printed from an authentic manuscript.

To this first edition is prefixed a dedication, written by the bookseller in the most contorted style, which has given rise to theories and conjectures without number. It runs as follows:—

TO. THE. ONLIE. BEGETTER. OF

THESE. INSVING. SONNETS.
MR. W. H. ALL. HAPPINESSE .
AND. THAT. ETERNITIE.

PROMISED.

BY.

OVR. EVER-LIVING. POET.
WISHETH.

THE. WELL-WISHING.

ADVENTVRER. IN.
SETTING.
FORTH.

Ꭲ . Ꭲ .

The meaning of the signature is clear enough, since "A booke called Shakespeare's Sonnets" was entered in the Stationers' Register on May 20, 1609, under the name of Thomas Thorpe. On the other hand, throughout this century and the last, there has been no end to the discussion as to what is meant by "onlie begetter" (only producer, or only procurer, or only inspirer?); and numberless have been the attempts to identify the "Mr. W. H." who is so designated. While the far-fetched expression "begetter" has been subjected to equally far-fetched interpretations, the most impossible guesses have been hazarded as to the initials W. H., and the most incredible conjectures put forward as to the person to whom the Sonnets are addressed.

Strange as it may seem, it is nevertheless the fact, that during the first eighty years of the eighteenth century the Sonnets were taken as being all addressed to one woman, all written in honour of Shakespeare's mistress. It was not till 1780 that Malone and

his friends declared that more than one hundred of the poems were addressed to a man. This view of the matter, however, did not even then command general assent, and so late as 1797 Chalmers seriously maintained that all the Sonnets were addressed to Queen Elizabeth, who was also, he believed, the inspirer of Spenser's famous Amoretti, in reality addressed to the lady who afterwards became his wife. Not until the beginning of this century did people in general understand, what Shakespeare's contemporaries can certainly never have doubted, that the first hundred and twenty-six Sonnets are directed to a young man.

It now followed almost of necessity that this young man should be identified with the "Mr. W. H." who is described as the "onlie begetter" of the poems. The second group, indeed, is addressed to a woman; but the first group is much the larger, and follows immediately upon the dedication.

Some have taken the word "begetter" to signify the man who procured the manuscript for the bookseller, and have conjectured that the initials are those of William Hathaway, a brother-inlaw of Shakespeare's (Neil, Elze). Dr. Farmer last century advanced the claims of William Hart, the poet's nephew, who, as was afterwards discovered, was not born until 1600. The mere fact that, by a whim or oversight of which there are many other examples in the first edition, the word "hues," in Sonnet xx., is printed in italics with a capital and spelt Hews, led Tyrwhitt to assume the existence of an otherwise unknown Mr. William Hughes, to whom he supposed the Sonnets to have been addressed. People have even been found to maintain that "Mr. W. H." referred to Shakespeare himself, some taking the "H." to be a mere misprint for "S.," others holding that the initials meant "Mr. William Himself" (Barnstorff).

Serious and competent critics for a long time inclined to the opinion that the "W. H." was a transposition of "H. W.," and represented none other than Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, whose close relation to the poet had long been known, and to whom his two narrative poems had been dedicated. This theory was held by Drake and Gervinus. But so early as 1832, Boaden advanced some strong objections to this view, which in our days has become quite untenable. There can be no doubt that the poet's friend whom the Sonnets celebrate bore the Christian name of William (see Sonnets cxxxv., cxxxvi., cxliii.),

whereas Southampton's Christian name was Henry. Southampton, moreover, never possessed the personal beauty incessantly dwelt upon in these poems. Finally, the Sonnets fit neither his age, nor his character, nor his history, full of movement, activity, and adverse fortune, to which no smallest allusion appears.

In the year 1601, when, as we shall presently see, Sonnets c. to cxxvi. must have been written, Southampton was twenty-eight years old, and consequently could not be the "lovely boy" addressed in Sonnet cxxvi., and compared in Sonnet cxiv. to a 66 cherubin."

There is only one person whose name, age, history, appearance, virtues, and vices accord in every respect with those of the "Mr. W. H." to whom the Sonnets are dedicated and addressed, and that is the young William Herbert, who in 1601 became Earl of Pembroke. Born on April 8, 1580, he came to London in the autumn of 1597 or spring of 1598, and very soon, in all probability, made the acquaintance of Shakespeare, with whom he doubtless remained on terms of friendship until the poet's death. The first folio of 1623 is dedicated by the editors to him and his brother, on the ground that they have "prosequuted" both the plays, "and their Authour liuing, with so much fauour." We see, too, that since Bright in 1819, and Boaden in 1832, had independently of each other put forward the theory that Pembroke was the hero of the Sonnets, this view has gradually made its way, and is now shared by the best critics (such as Dowden), while it has received, as it were, its final confirmation in the acute and often convincing critical observations contained in Mr. Thomas Tyler's book on the Sonnets, published in 1890.

The way by which we arrive at William Herbert is this: Shakespeare's Sonnets are not isolated poems. We very soon discern that they stand in an intimate relation to each other, a thought or motive suggested in one being developed more at length in the next or one of the subsequent Sonnets. The grouping proves to be by no means arbitrary, as was once thought to be the case; on the contrary, it is so careful that all attempts to alter it have only rendered the poems more obscure. The first seventeen Sonnets, for example, form a closely interwoven group; in all of them the friend is exhorted not to die unmarried, but to leave the world an heir to his beauty, which must otherwise fade

and perish with him. Sonnets c.-cxxvi., which are inseparably connected, turn on the reunion of the two friends after a coldness or misunderstanding has for a time severed them. Finally, Sonnets cxxvii.-clii. are all addressed, not to the friend, but to a mistress, the Dark Lady whose relation to the two friends has already formed the subject of earlier Sonnets.

Sonnet cxliv.-one of the most interesting, inasmuch it depicts in straightforward terms the poet's situation between friend and mistress-had already appeared, as above mentioned, in The Passionate Pilgrim (1599). It characterises the friend as the poet's "better angel," the mistress as his "worser spirit," and expresses the painful suspicion that the friend is entangled in the Dark Lady's toils

"I guess one angel in another's hell;"

so that both at once are lost to him, he through her and she through him.

But precisely the same theme is treated in Sonnet xl., which turns on the fact that the friend has robbed Shakespeare of his "love." These two Sonnets must thus be of the same date; and from Sonnet xxxiii., which relates to the same circumstances, we see that the friendship had existed only a very short time when it was overshadowed by the intrigue between the friend and the mistress :

"But out, alack! he was but one hour mine."

At what time, then, did the friendship begin? The date may be determined with some confidence, even apart from the question as to who the friend was. We know that Shakespeare must have written sonnets before 1598, since Meres published in that year his often-quoted words about the "sugred Sonnets"; but we cannot possibly determine which Sonnets these were, or whether we possess them at all, since those which passed from hand to hand among his private friends" may very possibly have disappeared. If they are included in our collection, we may take them to be those in which we find frequent parallels to lines in Venus and Adonis and the early comedies, though these coincidences are by no means sufficient, as Hermann Conrad1 would have us

1 Hermann Conrad in Preussische Jahrbücher, February 1895. Under the pseudonym of Hermann Isaac in Jahrbuch der Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, vol. xix. p. 176.