The Earl of Southampton the poet’s sole patron.
Shakespeare’s biographer is under an obligation to attempt an identification of the persons whose relations with the poet are defined so explicitly. The problem presented by the patron is simple. Shakespeare states unequivocally that he has no patron but one.
Sing [sc. O Muse!] to the ear that doth thy lays esteem,
And gives thy pen both skill and argument (c. 7-8).
For to no other pass my verses tend
Than of your graces and your gifts to tell (ciii. 11-12).
The Earl of Southampton, the patron of his narrative poems, is the only patron of Shakespeare that is known to biographical research. No contemporary document or tradition gives the faintest suggestion that Shakespeare was the friend or dependent of any other man of rank. A trustworthy tradition corroborates the testimony respecting Shakespeare’s close intimacy with the Earl that is given in the dedicatory epistles of his ‘Venus and Adonis’ and ‘Lucrece’, penned respectively in 1593 and 1594. According to Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeare’s first adequate biographer, ‘there is one instance so singular in its magnificence of this patron of Shakespeare’s that if I had not been assured that the story was handed down by Sir William D’Avenant, who was probably very well acquainted with his affairs, I should not venture to have inserted; that my Lord Southampton at one time gave him a thousand pounds to enable him to go through with a purchase which he heard he had a
mind to. A bounty very great and very rare at any time.’
There is no difficulty in detecting the lineaments of the Earl of Southampton in those of the man who is distinctively greeted in the sonnets as the poet’s patron. Three of the twenty ‘dedicatory’ sonnets merely translate into the language of poetry the expressions of devotion which had already done duty in the dedicatory epistle in prose that prefaces ‘Lucrece.’ That epistle to Southampton runs:
The love [127] I dedicate to your lordship is without end; whereof this pamphlet, without beginning, is but a superfluous moiety. The warrant I have of your honourable disposition, not the worth of my untutored lines, makes it assured of acceptance. What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have, devoted yours. Were my worth greater, my duty would show greater; meantime, as it is, it is bound to your lordship, to whom I wish long life, still lengthened with all happiness.
Your lordship’s in all duty,
William Shakespeare.
Sonnet xxvi. is a gorgeous rendering of these sentences:—
Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage
Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit,
To thee I send this written ambassage,
To witness duty, not to show my wit:
Duty so great, which wit so poor as mine
May make seem bare, in wanting words to show it,
But that I hope some good conceit of thine
In thy soul’s thought, all naked, will bestow it;
Till whatsoever star that guides my moving,
Points on me graciously with fair aspect,
And puts apparel on my tatter’d loving
To show me worthy of thy sweet respect
Then may I dare to boast how I do love thee;
Till then not show my head where thou may’st prove me. [128]
The ‘Lucrece’ epistle’s intimation that the patron’s love alone gives value to the poet’s ‘untutored lines’ is repeated in Sonnet xxxii., which doubtless reflected a moment of depression:
If thou survive my well-contented day,
When that churl Death my bones with dust shall cover,
And shalt by fortune once more re-survey
These poor rude lines of thy deceased lover,
Compare them with the bettering of the time,
And though they be outstripp’d by every pen,
Reserve them for my love, not for their rhyme,
Exceeded by the height of happier men.
O, then vouchsafe me but this loving thought:
‘Had my friend’s Muse grown with this growing age,
A dearer birth than this his love had brought,
To march in ranks of better equipage; [129]
But since he died and poets better prove,
Theirs for their style I’ll read, his for his love.’
A like vein is pursued in greater exaltation of spirit in Sonnet xxxviii.:
How can my Muse want subject to invent,
While thou dost breathe, that pour’st into my verse
Thine own sweet argument, too excellent
For every vulgar paper to rehearse?
O give thyself the thanks, if aught in me
Worthy perusal stand against thy sight;
For who’s so dumb that cannot write to thee,
When thou thyself dost give invention light?
Be thou the tenth Muse, ten times more in worth
Than those old nine which rhymers invocate;
And he that calls on thee, let him bring forth
Eternal numbers to outlive long date.
If my slight Muse do please these curious days,
The pain be mine, but thine shall be the praise.
The central conceit here so finely developed—that the patron may claim as his own handiwork the protégé’s verse because he inspires it—belongs to the most conventional schemes of dedicatory adulation. When Daniel, in 1592, inscribed his volume of sonnets
entitled ‘Delia’ to the Countess of Pembroke, he played in the prefatory sonnet on the same note, and used in the concluding couplet almost the same words as Shakespeare. Daniel wrote:
Great patroness of these my humble rhymes,
Which thou from out thy greatness dost inspire . . .
O leave [i.e. cease] not still to grace thy work in me . . .
Whereof the travail I may challenge mine,
But yet the glory, madam, must be thine.
Elsewhere in the Sonnets we hear fainter echoes of the ‘Lucrece’ epistle. Repeatedly does the sonnetteer renew the assurance given there that his patron is ‘part of all’ he has or is. Frequently do we meet in the Sonnets with such expressions as these:—
[I] by a part of all your glory live (xxxvii. 12);
Thou art all the better part of me (xxxix. 2);
My spirit is thine, the better part of me (lxxiv. 8);
while ‘the love without end’ which Shakespeare had vowed to Southampton in the light of day reappears in sonnets addressed to the youth as ‘eternal love’ (cviii. 9), and a devotion ‘what shall have no end’ (cx. 9).