Shakespeare's environment

by C. C. Stopes

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.