Shakespeare's environment

by C. C. Stopes

FOOTNOTES:

[30] I reproduced the whole of Bishop’s poem at the end of the fourth volume of Harrison’s “England,” edited by Dr. Furnivall.

XV
THE FRIENDS IN SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS

I take it, until proof yields a better date, that Shakespeare came to London in 1587. We know nothing definitely about him, until 1592, when Greene’s address to his fellow actors makes it clear that some time before that date he must have turned to the stage as a profession, and must have achieved some degree of success, for Greene bitterly describes him as “an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his tiger’s heart wrapt in a Player’s hide, supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you, and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his own conceit, the only Shakescene in a countrie.”[31]

When Shakespeare had come to London he had found theatres built, players performing, and dramatists writing for them, Lyly, Peele, Lodge, Greene, and Marlowe, who, had Shakespeare never come, would have been the greatest of all. But Shakespeare did come, and developed the perfect flower and fruit of the English Romantic Drama.

This remark would have been irrelevant to the subject in hand, but that I hold that the poet bore the same relation to the sonnet that he did to the Drama.

The Sonnet was not, as the Drama was, of native growth; it had been imported from Italy early in the century by the Earl of Surrey and his friend, Sir Thomas Wyat. They did not closely adhere to their Italian models, but varied them somewhat to suit the English language and taste. They had a group of courtly imitators, and various miscellanies appeared of verses, often but loosely called “sonnets,” poems written to be said or sung, which we now would rather call lyrics.

There were “The Court of Venus,”[32] much reprobated by serious writers, no copy of which has come down to us, “The Newe Court of Venus,”[32] which seems to have been an attempt to improve the old songs in tone, while adhering to their form, some of the verses having been written by Sir Thomas Wyat himself; “The Book of Songs and Sonnets,” 1557, or “Tottell’s Miscellany,” a collection chiefly of poems written by Wyat and Surrey, but also including some of the works of their imitators. We know that Shakespeare had read this volume, because he gave a copy to Slender (“Merry Wives,” i, 1).

It is interesting to know that Van der Noodt published a series, avowedly translated from the sonnets of Petrarch and Du Bellay, a translation of which, into English, in blank verse, was produced by Spenser in 1569, which were included in his works in 1591. Spenser’s “Shepherd’s Kalendar” came out in 1572.

The most important later miscellany was “The Paradise of Dainty Devises,” 1576, which we also may be sure that Shakespeare had read.

The harbinger of the new harvest of Elizabethan Sonnet Literature was Thomas Watson, who, in 1582, published his “Hecatompathia, or the Passionate Century of Love.” Two points may be noted concerning this: (1) That he named each sonnet a “Passion,” which explains Shakespeare’s use of the word in the phrase, “The Master-mistress of my passion;”[33] (2) that W. C., in his “Polimanteia,” 1595, in a marginal reference, not very clear in its bearing, said, “All praiseworthy Lucrecia, sweet Shakespeare, wanton Adonis, Watson’s heir.”

Puttenham’s “Art of English Poetry” was printed by Field, 1589. The first three books of Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” appeared in 1590, and Sir Philip Sidney’s “Arcadia” in the same year, which, quite as much as any sonnets, affected the thought of Shakespeare’s early works.

In 1591 was published Sidney’s “Astrophel and Stella,” with some of Daniel’s Sonnets, and in 1592 Daniel published a collection of “Sonnets to Delia,” after French models, dedicated to Sidney’s sister, the Countess of Pembroke. At the same time Henry Constable brought out “Diana: the Praises of his Mistress in certain Sonnets,” and “Four Letters and certain Sonnets” were published by Gabriel Harvey, the friend of Spenser.

Here I must pause, having reached the time of Shakespeare’s proved association with the Stage, in order to trace his career up to that date in his private life, and make clear my reasons for my main proposition concerning the necessarily early date of the Sonnets. Starting with Shakespeare’s arrival in London we must remember that the traditions concerning his being driven from Stratford by Thomas Lucy or by anybody else, can be disproved by fact and legitimate inference.

The only two facts we are sure of are, that he had married a wife and had a family before he was able to support them; and that neither his father nor he was in financial prosperity. His mother’s inheritance of Asbies, which, it is clear, his father meant as the sphere of his son’s career, had been lost through a mortgage and some juggling on the part of Edmund Lambert. In 1587 the Shakespeares, in despair of regaining it, had offered to sell it outright to John Lambert for another £20, and to this the poet, then of age and the heir apparent, had agreed, but that the money had never been paid is clear from later litigation.

We cannot prove to the sceptical anything concerning the poet for the next five years. But as Tennyson’s lover says of Maud,

I know the way she went

Home with her maiden posy,

For her feet have touched the meadows

And have left the daisies rosy:

a student may, with the fine sense acquired by patient loving study, read signs into known facts as clearly as that of Tennyson, that the morning daisies and buds when trodden on, lay their crimson under petals to the side, and the path is really made rosy. Our poet’s path may be traced in printer’s ink.

I believe that Shakespeare went to London in 1587 hoping to earn his fortune there, but that his plans were somewhat guided by business concerning this desired arrangement with John Lambert. There is little doubt he would first go to take counsel with Richard Field, the apprentice, who was about to become the son-in-law and successor of Thomas Vautrollier the great French printer. But the following morning, when he started on his mission, I venture to put forward a suggestion that his footsteps took a very different direction from what has usually been accepted; indeed, that Shakespeare began by seeking his fortune not at the play-house, but at the Court!

I find that a John Lambert, possibly the poet’s cousin, was a Yeoman of the Chamber at the time, and young Shakespeare might have hoped to persuade him to agree to the payment of that extra £20, or make up for it in Court influence. Why not? John Arden of Park Hall had been Esquire of the Body to Henry VII, his younger brother Robert, Yeoman of the Chamber to Henry VII and Henry VIII, his nephew or relative William held the same office to Queen Elizabeth down to 1584, and his son Robert was associated with him; John Scarlet, so friendly with the Ardens of Wilmcote, had been also Yeoman of the Chamber; Roger Shakespeare had held the same office in the reign of Mary, and Thomas Shakespeare was the Royal Messenger, at least down to 1575, possibly later. William Shakespeare was a man of good appearance and of manly courage, the two essentials for the post; he may have had many introductions, and evidently had high hopes. But he failed. We may realize his feelings during his first months in London by his works. It was not Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, who had learned by personal experience:

Who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,

... the law’s delay,

The insolence of office, and the spurns,

That patient merit of the unworthy takes.

The country was then stirred to its heart by the threatened Spanish invasion; gentlemen all over the country served in the ranks; it is possible that Shakespeare either served on board a ship or in the army at Tilbury, which the Queen herself went to address. If he did, he would be among the disbanded men in 1588, still seeking a post. There were men of lower rank he was almost sure to know; Sadler and Quiney, the grocers in Bucklersbury; John Shakespeare, the bit-maker of St. Martin in the Fields (not the later John of St. Clement Danes); Mathew Shakespeare, the goldsmith, who had married the sister of George Peele, the dramatist. With none of these did he seem to associate himself. But we have testimony that he did associate himself very freely with Richard Field. We see the suggestions of the books printed by him on many a page of Shakespeare’s works, and reading through the signs of his familiarity with the printer’s art we may well believe that he tried to give some return for hospitality by helping Field as much as he dared do. There was a limit, for the Stationers’ Company was very jealous of unapprenticed workmen, and fined Richard Field for keeping one. But there was nothing to prevent Shakespeare from helping in reading and correcting proof, and in 1589 Field brought out Puttenham’s “Art of English Poetry,” a liberal education to a would-be writer. Other special works were on Field’s shelves. A new edition of “Ovid,” Sir Thomas North’s translation of “Plutarch’s Lives,” “Salust du Bartas,” books on Music, Medicine, History, and Philosophy, which we can also see reflected in Shakespeare’s works. I could never satisfy myself with a natural reason for the inter-weaving of Giordano Bruno’s thought into the sonnets until I found that Vautrollier had printed his works, which were condemned, and he himself had to fly the country on account of them, flying, however, no further than Scotland, where the King welcomed him, and let him print his own new book “The essayes of a prentis, in the divine Art of Poesy.”

From the beginning of Shakespeare’s career he must have earned the epithet applied to him later by a fellow dramatist, Webster, who, in the introduction to Vittoria Corambona, spoke of “The right happy and copious industry of Master Shakespeare.”

He was preparing for a patron by the time he found one, but he had been forced, through the stress of circumstances, to take advantage of the only opportunity which had been opened to him, that is, on the stage, where his handsome figure would recommend him, and he probably had some influence through Warwickshire acquaintances. But it would take three years at least for any one to acquire the position outlined by Greene, so we may suppose that he entered the theatre as a “servitor” or apprentice in or about 1589. His work must have, at first, been hard, as he had to be trained, and from the Sonnets it was evidently distasteful.

The consideration of all the various opinions on, and interpretations of, the Sonnets would necessitate more space than can at present be given. Writers have differed widely concerning their autobiographical value, and those who do believe them to be autobiographical, disagree concerning the identity of the persons addressed, of the rival poets, and of Mr. W. H.

I believe that the Sonnets are a source of some authority, both biographical and autobiographical, but that they cannot be interpreted in crude realism. Shakespeare was not a prose diarist of the twentieth century, but a poet on the rising high tide of the most creative period of English literature, in the first fervours of poetic inspiration and romantic personal affection. After a period of trial, during which he had been agonizing in order to live and to support the lives of those that were dear to him, he had met some one who had the supreme inspiration to encourage and to help him in the way he needed.

Many of the allusions to conversations, common experiences, and common studies, are lost to the readers of later days, but some of the links of association may be restored by careful comparison. Sometimes the poet was only treating a common theme in hackneyed phrases, sometimes he was only transmuting current philosophy into verse, But sometimes he was trying to express feelings that lay too deep for words; his love and gratitude occasionally led him to impulsive exaggerations, his susceptibility to hasty misunderstandings. He knew how “to tear a passion to tatters, to very rags,” when his thoughts hurtled against each other from their very abundance and exuberance. But the twined threads of biography and autobiography are there, on which to string the pearls of Shakespeare’s thought. These threads can only be wound round the neck of Henry, the third Earl of Southampton.

No wrong has ever been done to Shakespeare’s memory so great as the publication of what has been called “the Herbert-Fitton theory.” The only cure for this, as for any other heresy, is more study, patient, unprejudiced, wide-reaching, long-enduring study, not only in the direct biography of the two men, but in contemporary life, thought, and literature. The theory was only possible to a real worker like Mr. Tylor, because he neglected the Baconian scientific advice, “to search after negatives.” He only attended to facts that seemed to support his hypothesis, and turned from those that opposed it, even when laid before him. Yet he has found followers numerous enough and important enough to be combated because they blind the multitude to other truths.

The Herbert-Fitton theory assumes that the Sonnets must have been written after the arrival of Lord Herbert at Court. This was in the spring of 1598, he being then eighteen years old. We are asked to imagine therefore that Shakespeare instantly was introduced to him, immediately began to write quatorzains, or disingenuously pretended to do so for the first time at this late date in the sonnet-harvest, ascribing to the newly-arrived Lord Herbert, not only inspiration, but education out of rude ignorance, and the guidance of his pupil-pen, after he had written, not only both of his poems, but his “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “The Merchant of Venice,” many other plays, and some of the Sonnets themselves in other plays.

It presumes that he must have warmed up, for this inexperienced young lord, not only the same feelings that he had formerly expressed for another, but the same phrases that he had already published. The whole beauty of “the passion” dies out before the supposition. We cannot read the Sonnets as hackneyed imitations of past fashions. They have all the verve of a fresh impulse, all the ideal transport of newly discovered power, all the original treatment of newly acquired music. Little in the data fits the supposition. Lord Herbert was not the sole hope of his great house, having both a father and a brother; he was not a fair youth, but exceptionally dark; he wore no long locks, curling “like buds of marjoram”; his breath could hardly have exhaled the odours of flowers (S. 99), seeing that a diarist states that his chief comfort was in the use of tobacco.

The lady with whom he was associated has been proved, on the other hand, to have been, not dark, but fair, not married and old in the world’s ways, but a bright young foolish girl of twenty-two, a favourite of the Queen and the Court, over-impulsive and credulous certainly, and probably vain and ambitious. But it was one thing, in the lax customs of the times, to became entangled with the handsomest and richest young bachelor of the Court, under the evident expectation of matrimony, and another to have risked her good name in going forth to tempt, with experienced wiles, in her even earlier years, the somewhat well-balanced heart of a middle-aged play-actor and moralist. What the propounders of this theory make of Shakespeare’s manliness or morality it is hard to say. An unwarrantable stain has been thrown on the girl’s character because Will Kemp, one of Shakespeare’s company in 1600, dedicated to her his “Nine Days Dance to Norwich.” But his lack of the supposed intimacy is shown on the title-page by the error even in her Christian name. The dedication was quite a natural one from the best dancer on the stage to the best dancer at Court. In the famous “Masque of the Nine Muses,” performed at Court at the marriage of “the other Lord Herbert,” “Mistress Fitton led, and went to the Queen, and wooed her to daunce. Her Majestie asked her what she was? ‘Affection!’ she said. ‘Affection?’ said the Queen, ‘Affection is false.’ Yet her Majestie rose and dawnced” (“Sydney Papers,” 23rd June 1600). Now I believe she should have said “Terpsichore,” which would account for both the Queen’s remark and Kemp’s dedication.

We are asked to believe that all the three-years story of the Sonnets had happened, and that Meres had had time to complete his notices of Shakespeare based on them, and get his book passed by the censor, and registered, within six months!

Finally, this theory pre-supposes that Thomas Thorpe, in 1609, would, upon the sole ground of two common initials, have taken the unwarrantable liberty of addressing in such familiar terms as “Mr. W. H.” the chief nobleman of the land, who, being the eldest son of an earl, had, from birth and baptism been designated Lord Herbert. Thorpe would not have been so short-sighted. That he was not so, can be proved from his dedications of Healey’s books[34] to the same nobleman in 1610 and 1616. The latter I found among Mr. W. C. Hazlitt’s “Prologues,” and first published it in extenso in relation to this controversy in the “Shakespeare Jahrbuch,” Berlin, 1890, to show how Thorpe really dedicated, “out of what frenzy one of my meannesse hath presumed to commit this Sacrilege.”

No, Pembroke was impossible!

In Shakespeare’s poems, dedications, and sonnets the songs and praises were—

To one, of one, still such and even so.—S. 105.

and that one was the Earl of Southampton.[35] His life and character alone provide all the essential desiderata; his dates alone fit into the chronology of the sonnet sequences and give Shakespeare his natural place in the history of literary development; his life alone gives a natural and unstrained account of “Mr. W. H.”

We do not know the exact circumstances under which Shakespeare met the Earl of Southampton.

Probably the young noble, in an outburst of sympathetic admiration and gratuitous criticism, greeted him with easy patronage on the stage, said to him, “You ought to learn to write poetry for yourself, come, and I will show you how,” took him home, gave him some more or less good advice on accent, manner, dress, law, literature, versification, and courtly tastes, for which posterity is grateful to him. Kind offices, on the one hand, were responded to by gratitude and adulation on the other. Hardly had Shakespeare been introduced to the Earl than he was made acquainted with the skeleton in the closet. To understand this we must turn to the fortunes of Southampton, or rather, in the first place, to those of his mother. For he was essentially “his mother’s boy,” though no critics have followed out her career in relation to Shakespeare’s environment. She was the daughter of Anthony Browne, Viscount Montague, and Jane, daughter of the Earl of Sussex. Her grandfather, Sir Anthony Browne, was considered the handsomest man in the country in Henry VIII’s time, and all the family were noted for personal beauty. She inherited a goodly share, as may be seen by her portrait, taken in 1565, at the age of thirteen, when she married Henry, second Earl of Southampton. This is now in the possession of the Duke of Portland at Welbeck.[36] It probably hung on the wall of Southampton’s home in Holborn when Shakespeare sung:

Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee

Calls back the lovely April of her prime.—S. 3.

Her elder son had died before his father, her second, Henry, had become sole heir to his great house when he was eight years old. He seems to have inherited, not only her beauty and her natural tints, as may be seen by his fine portrait also preserved at Welbeck, but to have resembled her in her characteristics. Cultured in taste, with a strong appreciation of humour, refined in sentiment, religious in spirit, she was generally able to control the self-will of her temper by a strong sense of duty, though sometimes her hasty impulsiveness verged almost on imprudence; faithful and self-forgetting in her affections, yet, through her very sensitiveness, easily offended; Mary, Countess of Southampton, does not seem to have been very happy in her marriage. Her somewhat severe husband had conceived some unjust cause of jealousy against her after his temper had been soured by his imprisonment in the Tower for the matter of the Duke of Norfolk and Mary Stuart. She wrote to her father on 21st March 1580, “My Lord sent me word it was not his intention to keep me prisoner, only he barred me of his board and presence ... neither could I take that but in the highest degree of imprisonment, howsoever it pleased him otherwise to esteem it.... I sent what I wrote by my little boye, but his heart was too great to bestow reading on it, coming from me.” Possibly his misunderstanding was the precursor of illness, for he died the following year (1581). He left her as bare as he could, and she wrote to the Earl of Leicester, entreating his kind offices on behalf of herself and her children, Henry and Mary. (These letters are among the MSS. of Cottrel Dormer, Esq., but being evidently misdated in the second appendix to “Rep. of Roy. Hist. Com.,” I applied to the present owner, who kindly allowed me to see them.) Her son became, of course, a royal ward, and he and his great possessions were put under the supervision of Lord Burghley. Camden warmly praises Southampton, and says “he spent his young years in the study of learning and good letters, and afterwards confirmed that study with travel and foreign observation.”

In December 1585 he was admitted to St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he became M.A., 6th June 1589, and was incorporated of Oxford. Before leaving College he enrolled himself a member of Gray’s Inn, 1587, where he seems to have studied as creditably as he had done at Cambridge.

But domestic trouble was rising. Burghley was impressed with the engaging personality, as well as the extensive possessions of young Henry Wriothesley, and, backed by a guardian’s privilege, wanted to secure him for his granddaughter, Lady Elizabeth Vere, the daughter of the Earl of Oxford. The young Earl seems to have become, under the persuasions of his mother and grandfather, to some extent, engaged. It was a suitable marriage in every way, had but the young people loved each other.

The poor Countess had been handicapped in the battle of life, because her husband’s family and her own, as well as she herself, had persisted in the expensive indulgence of exercising the rites of the Catholic religion. She well knew the enormous advantage it would be to the family to be known to be “connected with my Lord Burghley,” the “searchings” and “fines” it would help her to evade, the public offices it would secure to her son.

She urged him to complete the arrangements, his grandfather urged him, too. Perhaps, because of the very urging, the burden of matrimonial responsibilities became more and more distasteful. Dreams of military glory under his admired Earl of Essex disturbed his studies in old Gray’s Inn. Burghley began to make inquiries. He could not understand how any young man in his senses could refuse such a splendid offer, or even hesitate in accepting it. He suspected interlopers. He fancied that Sir Thomas Stanhope might be trying to win him for his daughter; but that gentleman wrote a long and very full explanatory letter to Burghley on 10th July 1590, clearing himself of any such treacherous presumption.

The Countess had, it is true, gone with her son to see Mr. Harvey, who lived next door, and he had asked them to sup with him, that was all. Lady Southampton had told him “She knew what a stay you would be to him and to her ... in good fayth she would do her best in the cause.... She did not find a disposition in her son to be tied as yet; what will be hereafter time shall try, and no want shall be found on her behalf.” Burghley seems next to have consulted Viscount Montague, who replied on 19th September 1590 from Cowdray that he had “tried as orderly as he could, first to acquaint his mother, and then himself with your lordship’s letter, his lordship being with me at Cowdray....” His daughter had told him that she did not know of her son’s fancy having changed to any other maiden, and the youth had replied that “Your lordship was this last winter well pleased to yield unto him a further respite of one year to ensure resolution in respect of his young years.” I told him that the year was almost up, and said “that it was natural your lordship should wish to have the matter about his granddaughter settled.” The most he could get out of his grandson was a promise that he would himself carry his answer to Lord Burghley, and Montague arranged that he and his daughter should take him to London at the beginning of the term.

On the 6th of October Southampton completed his seventeenth year. He took, if he did not receive, another “year’s respite,” and on 2nd March following, 1590-1, he wrote from Dieppe to the Earl of Essex offering him the service of his sword. The Earl of Essex had lately married the widow of Sir Philip Sydney, much to the Queen’s wrath, and he was in some trouble himself. He did not risk accepting the offer of the Royal ward.

Southampton was recalled to London, and then, in the April of 1591, he probably first met, at least as a friend, that inland-bred actor, who so strangely fascinated him, and soothed him somewhat in his regret at being forbidden to follow Lord Essex. Someone suggested to the Countess, or to the new poet himself on her behalf, that he, a married man, should try to make the young lord “Suivez raison” (the family motto of the Brownes). The most likely person to do so was the stalwart and prudent Mr. William Harvey, who had won golden opinions from all sorts of people at the time of the Spanish Armada in 1588, and who was a devoted friend of the family. If we allow ourselves to realize the likelihood of this, we find one key to the mystery of the dedication to the sonnets lying ready to hand in a place where no one before has looked for it. (See my article, “Who is Mr. W. H.?” “Athenæum,” 4th August 1900.)

It was held a part of the higher culture, then, to be able to write verses and to sing them to the lute, and, as such, doubtless Southampton had essayed to do after the model of Thomas Watson at least, and we have noted what had been published by that date.

Manuscript copies of the verses of the Earl of Essex, poured forth when he wanted “to evaporate his feelings in a sonnet,” would probably also be found in that Holborn home, when, in that “mutual improvement society for two,” the principles of literature were discussed. The young Earl, with his beautiful expressive eyes lit up by intellectual fire, with his fair face, rich attire, gracious manners, ingenuous outlook into life and philosophy, and enthusiastic inclination to help, made a real conquest of the hungering home-sick heart of the poor player, and such a love was kindled as had not been sung since the days of Jonathan and David. It was because Shakespeare could feel as well as write that he found the sonnet silver and left it golden. Mr. Wyndham, in his splendid introduction to the “Poems of Shakespeare,” leaves nothing unsaid concerning their aesthetic charm. Excepting the first few I do not think the order of the sonnets at all correct. Some critics accept the 107th as necessarily the last, and we know that those to the lady should have been sandwiched in between those to the youth if the date of production had been the principle of arrangement. Within the two series also the order has evidently been disturbed somehow.

We know that they are not all on the same level of merit; neither do I think them all constructed with the same “intention.” The last two evidently should come first, two forms of expressing the same idea from foreign sources which had probably been read to the poet by the patron.

Those to the youth were evidently intended to be sent, and were sent: the earliest ones probably through his mother. Those to the lady were written, as Goëthe puts it, “to work off a feeling,” or to shape the expression of “a passion.” The poet might have sung them to the lady, but he would not risk the chances of sending them in black and white. When the feeling had “evaporated” they would be sent in block to the friend, and thus be kept together, though possibly multiplied in copies among friends, one of whom must have proved unfaithful, or Jaggard would not have secured two by 1599.

It was doubtless with some sense of self-reproach that Shakespeare, yielding to the family arguments, turned the engines of his new power upon his patron, urging him to marry. Training and straining are both too visible in the admonitory sonnets, which smell of Sidney’s “Arcadia.” The first seven sonnets, to which I would add the eleventh and twelfth, make a sequence by themselves. The second sequence shows deepening affection, freer hand, more original conceptions. He bids the youth wed to complete a harmony, to make war with Time, and to do so “for love of me,” S. 10. Started as a literary experiment they developed more and more into the expression of personal feeling, and the advice to matrimony became subordinate, In the 13th Sonnet the poet first addressed the youth as “love”; in the 20th and 21st he took him as the inspiration and his muse.

A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted

Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion.—S. 20.

So is it not with me as with that muse

Stirred by a painted beauty to his verse.—S. 21.

It was something for a poet living lonely in London to have such a wholesome and safe source of inspiration. The young noble was vain, and there was a subtle charm in being thus sung to by one whose genius he thought he had evoked. He listened more patiently to his poet than he had done to his mother and friends, but of course the sonnets had no effect in mending his misogynic mood. Their writer never expected they would do so, probably did not even wish it. The first double set of twenty-five was marked out by a separation which is recorded in history.

The Queen was to be at Cowdray, Viscount Montague’s country house, from the 15th until the 22nd of August 1591, and the youth would be summoned to his grandfather’s assistance. The Queen and Court afterwards went on to his own house at Tichfield. Special opportunities would be certain to be made for him on this occasion. Essex was not at Court, and Sir Fulke Greville and others were trying to replace him by this friendly rival. Every young nobleman of the day was trained to act in courtly devices, and much depended on compliment with Elizabeth. Shakespeare would very likely have given his “sweet boy” return lessons in dramatic art, which he is nearly sure to have tried to display on this important occasion.

During this first period of separation, as Shakespeare wrote, there had been dawning on him the conception of a poem, by which he might at once take his position in the world of letters, honour his friend’s teaching, and in a somewhat allegorical fashion, after the Spenserian “second intention,” show how the entreaties of Venus fall unheeded upon ears intent on other music, and upon hearts filled with other interests. I do not wish now to go into any criticism of “Venus and Adonis,” but comparison makes it clear that the Sonnets were written about the same time, and addressed to the same person.

Describe Adonis,[37] and the counterfeit

Is poorly imitated after you!—S. 51.

The work on the poem checked the supply of Sonnets. Through the next year it developed, a joy apart from the strains of the miserable time. It was a year quite black enough to colour all poor grumbling Greene’s bitter spite against the “Johannes Factotum,” who could both act and redact plays; a year gloomy enough to tone the picture of the reverse poem which came insistently into Shakespeare’s brain to complete his “Venus” conception. For he began to take two sides to paint his pictures even then, as he always afterwards did.

Another separation had taken place. In the autumn of 1592 Southampton was in the Queen’s train at Oxford, acknowledged by all to be the brightest ornament of her Court. Probably by the end of 1592 Shakespeare sent him the completed manuscript of his poem, with the private dedication of the 26th Sonnet, before he began to arrange about the publication of his “written ambassage,” bidding him keep it

Till whatsoever star that guides my moving

Points on me graciously with fair aspect,

And puts apparel on my tattered loving

To show me worthy of thy sweet respect:—S. 26.

that is by having it printed and bound.[38] By 18th April 1593 the Archbishop of Canterbury had licensed it, and Richard Field had entered it as his copy in the Stationers’ Registers. A more timid prose dedication faced the critical world. The poet would not shame his friend, nor commit him to anything, until he knew how the public would receive him. Then came a surprise doubtless to both of them, and certainly to others. Adonis leaped at once into popularity! I noted that before he had completed his first Essay of a Prentice in the Divine Art of Poesy, Shakespeare had sketched the outline of the “graver labour,” alluded to in the Preface to his “Venus and Adonis.” Some of the later Sonnets seem to be studies for Tarquin, as some of the earlier had been studies for Adonis. It is worth considering Sonnet 129 in this light.

The Sonnets had been affected by the appearance of “Astrophel and Stella” in 1591, and the author was probably incited by the appearance of Daniel’s “Delia” and Constable’s “Diana” in 1592 to new variations.

After Southampton’s return to London he seems to have become interested in other poets, and to have spent some of the hours hitherto devoted to Shakespeare with other literary acquaintances. Thence sprang the allusions to the “alien pens” (S. 87), the “better spirit” (S. 80), the “proud full sail of his great verse.” Doubtless the chief rival was Chapman, who even then was doing worthy work. But he has left no notice of the Earl of Southampton until much later years. Evidently the young Earl, moved by his poet’s suffering, had granted that he “was married to his muse,” and had refused to become the special patron of other poets. Indeed, he had shown a fit of answering jealousy, alluded to in Sonnet 109. But all frictions were smoothed away, and the happy friend and triumphant poet was able to redeem his promise and to publish his “graver labour” in May 1594, expressing his love to his patron in nearly the same terms as he had used in Sonnet 26. His “Lucrece” assured his position in the literary world and cleared his character in the eyes of sober men.

I have said that I do not think the order of the sonnets correct, that the love-sonnets should have been interleaved with the others, that they had not been sent, and that they did not mean so much as they seemed to import. Nevertheless, it seems evident that in the plague year, with all its depressing influences, in the absence of his friend, Shakespeare himself had been tempted by a dark-eyed witch, a married woman, experienced in coquettish wiles. We do not know who the lady was. I do not think she was a lady at all in the Court sense of the word. Many coincidences support my opinion that she was a rich citizen’s wife (some of these had been educated by wealthy fathers to the level of the culture of the time in art and music); a citizen’s wife who had been married just long enough to feel a sense of ennui creep into her leisurely life, and a desire for new conquests to awake in her vain heart. Such a one he might have met in the very house he must most have frequented. I do not know anything about the moral principles of Mrs. Jacquinetta Field, and do not wish to bring my views as a personal charge against her. But she fulfilled all the necessary external conditions, and she was a Frenchwoman, therefore likely to have dark eyes, a sallow complexion, and that indefinable charm so much alluded to. Such a woman might very well have ignored young Shakespeare when he first came, poor and unknown, about her husband’s house, But when she found him popular and making his way among the aristocracy she might suddenly have become interested in him, and tried to attract him. Other men’s sonnets had taught her how to act. She tuned her sweetest music to his tastes, and played remorselessly upon her poet’s heart. After the publication of “Venus and Adonis” by Richard Field, she might achieve her desire of meeting Shakespeare’s Earl. She entangled him for a short time in a game of bagatelle, in order to torture her victim, though it really seems to have cured him. And then, it was all over, there was no treachery, no cruelty, it was all a mistake, a comedy of errors. The echo of the explanations ring through Shakespeare’s plays, as well as through his sonnets. A strange outside reflection of this little domestic drama seems clearly intended in “Willobie’s Avisa,” registered on 3rd September 1594, in which Shakespeare’s “Lucrece” is definitely mentioned, and H. W. and W. S. alluded to, under conditions that strongly suggest the story of the Sonnets. It shows the picture of a wonderfully admired woman of incorruptible chastity, beset by many wooers, these two among them. “W. S. determined to see whether it would sort to a happier end for this new actor, H. W., then it did for the old player.” Many strange parallels between the book and the sonnets might be noted, and I have a shrewd suspicion that the dark lady herself was a moving spirit in its publication. Personalities were evidently intended and resented, and the book was “called in.” But the pain of the publication rankled in Shakespeare’s heart:

’Tis better to be vile, than vile esteemed.—S. 121.

In the same month as Shakespeare brought out his “Lucrece,” the Countess of Southampton married Sir Thomas Heneage, a trusted friend of the Queen’s, and Vice-Chamberlain of the Royal Household. Henceforth Court patronage was opened to Shakespeare, and during the following Christmas holidays, for the first time, his name was entered in the accounts of the Privy Chamber, as having played before the Queen at Greenwich. Curiously enough, on the evening of the same day, his company is recorded to have appeared suddenly amid the confusion of the Gray’s Inn Revels, and to have performed “The Comedy of Errors” on the stage designed for graver concerts. This led to great trouble in Gray’s Inn, and mysterious investigations, in which an enchanter was blamed. Nobody asked who paid the players? I have always fancied Southampton did, and that he introduced them, for how, without the permission of some fellow of Gray’s Inn, could they have had access to the stage.[39] Bacon was employed to write a device to “restore the honour of Gray’s Inn,” lost on The Night of Errors.

In two ways, both painful to the poet, during the following year, while Sir Thomas Heneage’s illness absorbed the attention of the Countess of Southampton, his young friend’s name had become bandied about among the gossiping cliques of Paul’s Walk. His friends, Sir Charles and Henry Danvers, instigated by personal revenge, for some cause unknown, had, in January 1594-5, taken their servants and gone out deliberately to murder two men, the Longs, which they had succeeded in doing. They stalled their horses in Southampton’s stables at Tichfield that night, and when they went to London next day he rode with them and helped them to escape to France. It is very difficult to understand the meaning of this episode in his life, for the Danvers remained his friends. The other was more natural. Southampton, “having passed by the ambush of young days,” at last fell incurably in love with the fair Mistress Elizabeth Vernon (the daughter of Sir John Vernon), cousin of the Earl of Essex, and Maid of Honour to the Queen. He needed no sonnets now to urge him to marry, but the Queen forbade the banns. He hovered round the Court, the “Sydney Papers” state that he was, in the absence of Essex, “a careful waiter here, and sede vacanto doth receive favours at her Majesty’s hands, all this without breach of amity between them.” But it was the other Elizabeth who drew him thither. Hasty and impulsive as he was, “My Lord Southampton doth with too much familiarity court the fair Mistress Vernon, while his friends, observing the Queen’s humour towards my Lord of Essex, do what they can to bring her to favour him, but it is yet in vain,” wrote Rowland Whyte, 22nd September 1595.

This gossip sunk into Shakespeare’s heart. He knew that he might be blamed by some, as the Earl’s adviser, and he called him to task in Sonnets 95 and 96. After the commencement of this absorbing passion the sonnets gradually ceased. Probably Shakespeare realized that his reign was over. None seem to suggest Southampton’s voyages, knighthood, marriage, or subsequent imprisonment. For the allusions in Sonnet 107 must not be confused with this.

Having interwoven many of the phrases, ideas, and even situations of the sonnets into his plays, having thrown in even some of the verses entire, Shakespeare’s fame became fixed in 1598 by the liberal praise of Francis Meres, Professor of Rhetoric at Oxford, who noted not only the plays and the poems, but “the sugred sonnets among his private friends.”

By some means, pirate Jaggard got possession of two of these private sonnets, culled those already printed in the plays, stole many verses from other writers, among them the “Paris to Helen” and “Helen to Paris” of Thomas Heywood, and published them in 1599 as “‘The Passionate Pilgrim,’ by William Shakespeare,” eager to exploit the value of his name.

To reclaim his own, Heywood published them, as he had intended, in his “Troia Britannica,” registered before 1609. Apparently Jaggard published a second edition, probably in 1609. In the postscript of his “Apology for Actors,” 1612, Heywood complained of Jaggard’s “manifest injury,” and stated that the reputed author was much offended with the publisher for “having altogether unknown to him, presumed to make so bold with his name.”

This is interesting to us, because it is the only recorded notice of Shakespeare’s opinion of his publishers. Indeed it is just possible that Shakespeare permitted, if he did not suggest, the publication of his Sonnets, in order, by showing all that he laid claim to, at once to punish Jaggard, and protect Heywood and other injured poets. In spite of Heywood’s and Shakespeare’s protest, Jaggard brought out a third edition of the “Passionate Pilgrim” in 1612, stating that they were “newly corrected and augmented by W. Shakespeare. Whereunto is newly added two Epistles, the first from Paris to Helen, and Helen’s answer back again to Paris.” But pressure was evidently brought to bear upon Jaggard, for though this stands in the title-page, the epistles do not appear in the text.

To whatever cause we owe it, the Sonnets were published in 1609, long after the vogue of sonneteering had passed, by T. T., i.e. Thomas Thorpe, with an address to Mr. W. H. The chief battlefield in the history of the sonnets has been over the meaning of those initials. I believe, as I have said above, that they mean Mr. William Harvey.

Sir Thomas Heneage had died in 1595, leaving the Countess of Southampton the second time a widow, in trouble over his bills, and not over well treated by her friends. Shortly after her son’s stolen marriage to Elizabeth Vernon in 1598 she had promised to marry her faithful friend, now her knight, Sir William Harvey. Her action roused the indignation of her son at first, and caused discomfort among her friends. Harvey’s family and position were not equal to hers, and matrimony in a mother is sometimes inconvenient to a son. The Earl of Essex himself took the trouble to counsel her gravely. But like her son she held her own way through thick and thin, and married Sir William Harvey that same year. She died in 1607, and it was reported by Chamberlain that “she had left the best part of her stuff to her son, and the most part to her husband.” It is very likely that a manuscript copy of “Shakespeare’s Sonnets” would be left among “the most part,” and it is quite possible that after consultation with Southampton and Shakespeare, Harvey, always a patron of letters, prepared them himself to be published.

Thomas Thorpe was too glad of the chance of becoming a merchant adventurer on the sea of publication. If, as I have shown to have been possible, Sir William had, in the first instance, suggested the writing of the early sonnets, the meaning of Thorpe’s address is clear. It was quite usual to address a gentleman as “Mr.” after his knighthood. Lady Southampton always spoke of her second husband as Mr. Heneage. Further, since the death of his first wife, in 1607, Sir William had consoled himself with a bright young bride, Mistress Cordelia Ansley, of Lee. It would therefore be perfectly consonant with Thorpe’s gratitude and his character to wish “Mr. W. H. all happinesse, and that eternitie promised by the everlasting poet.”

The “eternity” intended might have been that of a long line of descendants to keep up his noble name[40] (for it was a Thorpe who wrote the address).

It may be urged that I cannot prove this. I acknowledge it. But surely an explanation so simple and one that fits so naturally into the whole known series of facts, may be justly considered and duly treated as a good working hypothesis, until something better may be discovered.[41] And the surest way to learn more of Shakespeare is to learn more about his friends.

“Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature,”

vol. xxviii (read 24th June 1908).

PS.—I had embodied most of these facts in the preface to my edition of “Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” 1904 (De La More Press) and in my articles in the “Athenæum.”