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.