Can any body believe that, if these six poems had been the work of the mighty Shakespeare of the Shakespeareans, they would have waited until 1838 without a reader? And, most wonderful of all, that this mighty poet in his own lifetime would allow six of his poems to be torn up into isolated stanzas by a printer, stirred together and run into type hap-hazard, and sold as his "Sonnets?" The Shakespeareans tell us sometimes of their William's utter indifference to fame, but they have never claimed for him an imperturbability quite so stolid as this. And while we could not well imagine Mr. Tennyson regarding with complaisance a publisher who would print his "Maud," "Locksley Hall," "Lady Clara," etc., each verse standing by itself, and calling the whole "Mr. Tennyson's Sonnets," so we fancy even Mr. Shakespeare of the Globe, had he been their author, would have thought the printers were going a little too far.
But, all the same, the Shakespeareans, Mr. Armitage Brown among the rest, are determined that these sonnets shall be Shakespeare's and nobody else's, and proceed to tell us who "Mr. W. H." (to whom Mr. Thorpe, at William Shakespeare's request—as if the the man who wrote the sonnets could not write a dedication of them—dedicated them) is. Certain of them believe the letters "W. H." to be a transposition of "H. W.," in which case they might stand for "Henry Wriothesley," Earl of Southampton. Mr. Boaden and two Mr. Browns * read them, as they stand, to mean William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke (in either case accounting for William Shakespeare addressing in earl as "Mr."—which may mean "Mister" or "Master"—on the score of earl and commoner having been the closest of "chums").
* Shakespeare's Autographical Poems." By Charles Armitage
Brown. London, 1838. "The Sonnets of Shakespeare solved,"
etc. By Henry Brown. London, 1870.
A learned Frenchman, M. Chasles, has conjectured that Thomas Thorpe wrote the first half of the dedication, including the "Mr. W. H.," and William Shakespeare the second half (including, perhaps, though M. Chasles does not say so, the "T. T.") One equally learned German (Herr Bernsdorff) suggests that "W. H." means "William Himself," and that the great Shakespeare meant to dedicate these poems to his own personality (as George Wither, in 1611, dedicated his satirical poems, "G. W. wisheth himself all happiness;") and another supposes Shakespeare to have been in love with a negress, "black but comely," like the lady of the Canticles. Yet another, that this dark lady typified "Dramatic art," the Roman Catholic church, etc., etc. Mr. Dowden will have it that Shakespeare and Spenser, and Mento that Shakespeare and Chapman were rivals for the lady's favor. And there have been other and even more puerile speculations put gravely forth by these same learned and venerable commentators: such as, since the word "Hewes" (in the line, "A man in Hewes all Hewes in his controlling"), is spelled with a capital letter, that, therefore, "AY. H." is William Hewes (whoever he might have been). Wadsworth believes that these sonnets were the repository of the real emotions of William Shakespeare, as a relief to long simulation of other people's emotions in his dramas; while Mr. William Thompson * believes them to be The Sonnett, which Bacon mentions writing in or about 1598, saying: "It happened a little before that time that her Majesty had a purpose to dine at Twickenham Park, at which time I had (though I profess not to be a poet) prepared a sonnet, directly tending and alluding to draw on her Majesty's reconcilement to my lord, which I remember I also showed to a great person," etc.
* The Renascence Drama, or History made Visible. By William
Thompson, F. R. C. S., F. L. S. Melbourne: Sands & Me-
Dougal, Collins street, West, 1880, p. 113, et seq.
Now, Mr. Thompson believes that this "great person" was William Herbert, who read them among the friends of the putative author—was, in short, the "W. H." Mr. Thompson points out that, if these sonnets are not Bacon's Sonnet, the latter has never been found, among Bacon's papers or elsewhere.
If these are the sonnets distributed by William Shakespeare among his private friends—of which Meres seems to have known in 1598—there would be this historical difficulty in connecting them with Lord Herbert, afterwards Earl of Pembroke, viz: In the Sydney Papers * is preserved a letter from Rowland White to Sir Robert Sydney, in which the writer says: "My Lord Herbert hath, with much ado, brought his father to consent that he may live at London, but not before the next spring." This letter is dated April 19,1597. "The next spring" would be 1598, the very year in which Meres speaks of these sonnets as in existence among William Shakespeare's friends. Of course, they might have been afterwards collected and dedicated by their author.
* Vol. II., p. 43.
But at the time they were so collected, Lord Herbert was Earl Pembroke, and was surely not then, if he had ever been (which he had not), plain "Mr. H." In other words, if the sonnets were William Shakespeare's, he must either have dedicated them to a stranger—a boy at Oxford—or have waited until that hoy had become of age and an earl, and then dedicated them to him in either case by a title not his own. In the absence of explanation., nowadays, we would be obliged to regard such a dedication an insult rather than a compliment. And men were at least no less punctilious about titles in the age of Elizabeth than they are to-day.
It is interesting, in this connection, to note that in 1595, and while young Lord Herbert was at Oxford, a play, "Edward III.," was entered in the register of the Stationers' Company. In both this play and in Sonnett XCIV. occur the line,