under the title of "Nine Daies Wonder," was, as Mr. W. A. Harrison has shown, almost certainly dedicated to her. The actual wording of the dedication is to "Mistris Anne Fitton, Mayde of Honour to the most sacred Mayde, Royal Queene Elisabeth." But it is absolutely certain that neither in 1600 nor in the previous year was there any Anne Fitton among Elizabeth's maids-of-honour. Kemp must, therefore, have been mistaken as to the Christian name of his patroness, or the printer must have misread the name Marie and converted it into Anne, an error to which the handwriting of the period might easily give rise. This little book gives us a most interesting glimpse into the English life of that age. The most important duty of the clown was not to appear in the play itself, but to sing and dance his jig at the end of it, even after a tragedy, in order to soften the painful impression. The common spectator never went home without having seen this afterpiece, which must have resembled the comic "turns" of our variety-shows. Kemp's jig of The Kitchen-Stuff Woman, for instance, was a screaming farrago of rude verses, some spoken, others sung, of good and bad witticisms, of extravagant acting and dancing. It is of such a performance that Hamlet is thinking when he says of Polonius: "He's for a jig, or a tale of bawdry, or he sleeps." As the acknowledged master of his time in the art of comic dancing, Kemp was immoderately loved and admired. He paid professional visits to all the German and Italian courts, and was even summoned to dance his Morrice Dance before the Emperor Rudolf himself at Augsburg. It was in his youth that he undertook the nine days' dance from London to Norwich which he describes in his book. He started at seven o'clock in the morning from in front of the Lord Mayor's house, and half London was astir to see the beginning of the great exploit. His suite consisted of his "taberer," his servant, and an "overseer" or umpire to see that everything was performed according to promise. The journey was almost as trying to the "taberer" as to Kemp, for he had his drum hanging over his left arm and held his flageolet in his left hand while he beat the drum with his right. Kemp himself, on this occasion, contributed nothing to the music except the sound of the bells which were attached to his gaiters. He reached Romford on the first day, but was so exhausted that he had to rest for two days. The people of StratfordLangton, between London and Romford, had got up a bearbaiting show in his honour, knowing "how well he loved the sport"; but the crowd which had gathered to see him was so great that he himself only succeeded in hearing the bear roar and the dogs howl. On the second day he strained his hip, but cured the strain by dancing. At Burntwood such a crowd had gathered to see him that he could scarcely make his way to the tavern. There, as he relates, two cut-purses were caught in the act, who had followed with the crowd from London. They declared that they had laid a wager upon the dance, but Kemp recognised one of them as a noted thief whom he had seen tied to a post in the theatre. Next day he reached Chelmsford, but here the crowd which had accompanied him from London had dwindled away to a couple of hundred people. In Norwich the city waits received him in the open marketplace with an official concert in the presence of thousands. He was the guest of the town and entertained at its expense, received handsome presents from the mayor, and was admitted to the Guild of Merchant Venturers, being thereby assured a share in their yearly income, to the amount of forty shillings. The very buskins in which he had performed his dance were nailed to the wall in the Norwich Guild Hall and preserved in perpetual memory of the exploit. So popular an artist as this must of course have felt himself at least Shakespeare's equal. He certainly assumed the right to address one of her Majesty's Maids-of-Honour with no slight familiarity. The tone in which he dedicates this catch penny performance to Mrs. Fitton offers a remarkable contrast to the profoundly respectful tone in which professional authors couch their dedications to their noble patrons or patronesses : "In the waine of my little wit I am forst to desire your protection, else every Ballad-singer will proclaime me bankrupt of honesty. . . . To shew my duety to your honourable selfe, whose favours (among other bountifull friends) make me (dispight this sad world) iudge my hert Corke and my heeles feathers, so that me thinkes I could fly to Rome (at least hop to Rome, as the old Prouerb is) with a Morter on my head." The free and confidential style of this dedication not only proves that one of the actor caste could approach a great lady like Mrs. Fitton without a too strict observance of the distance between them, but also affords conclusive proof that that emancipated young lady was intimately acquainted with members of the very company to which Shakespeare belonged. PLATONISM VII IN SHAKESPEARE'S AND MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS—THE TECHNIQUE of the SONNETS THE fact that the person to whom Shakespeare's Sonnets are dedicated is simply entitled "Mr. W. H." long served to divert attention from William Herbert, as it was thought that it would have been an impossible impertinence thus to address, without his title, a nobleman like the Earl of Pembroke. To us it is clear that this form of address was adopted precisely in order that Pembroke might not be exhibited to the great public as the hero of the conflict darkly adumbrated in the Sonnets. They were not, indeed, written quite without an eye to publication, as is proved by the poet's promises that they are to immortalise the memory of his friend's beauty. But it was not Shakespeare himself who gave them to the press, and bookseller Thorpe must have known very well that Lord Pembroke would not care to see himself unequivocally designated as the lover of the Dark Lady and the poet's favoured rival, especially as that dramatic episode of his youth ended in a manner which it can scarcely have been pleasant to recall. The modern reader who takes up the Sonnets with no special knowledge of the Renaissance, its tone of feeling, its relation to Greek antiquity, its conventions and its poetic style, finds nothing in them more surprising than the language of love in which the poet addresses his young friend, the positively erotic passion for a masculine personality which here finds utterance. The friend is currently addressed as "my love." Sometimes it is stated in so many words that in the eyes of his admirer the friend combines the charms of man and woman; for instance, in Sonnet xx. :— "A woman's face, with Nature's own hand painted, Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion." This Sonnet ends with a playful lament that the friend had not been born of the opposite sex; yet such is the warmth of expression in other Sonnets that one very well understands how the critics of last century supposed them to be addressed to a woman.1 This tone, however, is so characteristic a fashion of the age, that a number of writers, and especially those who have gone most deeply into contemporary English and Italian literature, have found in it, and in other traits of mere convention, an argument for holding the circumstances set forth to be in the main imaginary, and denying to the Sonnets all direct autobiographical value. It has been insisted that love for a beautiful youth, which the study of Plato had presented to the men of the Renaissance in its most attractive light, was a standing theme among English poets of that age, who, moreover, as in Shakespeare's case, were wont to praise the beauty of their friend above that of their mistress. The woman, too, as in this case, often enters as a disturbing element into the relation. It was an accepted part of the convention that the poet should represent himself as withered and wrinkled, whatever his real age might be; Shakespeare does so again and again, though he was at most thirty-seven. Finally, it was quite in accordance with use and wont that the fair youth should be exhorted to marry, so that his beauty might not die with him. Shakespeare had already placed such exhortations in the mouth of the Goddess of Love in Venus and Adonis. Dr. Adolf Hansen, in his Danish translation of the Sonnets, has pointed out several other impersonal traits. Some of the weaker Sonnets, with their "wire-drawn and complicated imagery (Sonnets xxiv., xlvi., xlvii.), so clearly bear the stamp of the age that they cannot be regarded as personally characteristic of Shakespeare; while others are such evident imitations that it is 1 For instance, in Sonnet xxiii. :— "O let my books be then the eloquence And dumb presagers of my speaking breast, And in Sonnet xxvi. : "Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage 2 Such as Delius and Elze in Germany and Schück in Sweden. |