It is quite otherwise with the Sonnets. In the first place nowhere in Shakespere's work is it more necessary to brush away the cobwebs of the commentators. This side of madness, no vainer fancies have ever entered the mind of man than those which have been inspired by the immaterial part of the matter. The very initials of the dedicatee "W. H." have had volumes written about them; the Sonnets themselves have been twisted and classified in every conceivable shape; the persons to whom they are addressed, or to whom they refer, have been identified with half the gentlemen and ladies of Elizabeth's court, and half the men of letters of the time; and every extremity and eccentricity of non-natural interpretation has been applied to them. When they are freed from this torture and studied rationally, there is nothing mysterious about them except the mystery of their poetical beauty. Some of them are evidently addressed in the rather hyperbolical language of affection, common at the time, and derived from the study of Greek and Italian writers, to a man; others, in language not hyperbolical at all, to a woman. Disdain, rivalry, suspense, short-lived joy, long sorrow, all the symptoms and concomitants of the passion of love—which are only commonplaces as death and life are commonplace—form their motives. For my part I am unable to find the slightest interest or the most rudimentary importance in the questions whether the Mr. W. H. of the dedication was the Earl of Pembroke, and if so, whether he was also the object of the majority of the Sonnets; whether the "dark lady," the "woman coloured ill," was Miss Mary Fitton; whether the rival poet was Chapman. Very likely all these things are true: very likely not one of them is true. They are impossible of settlement, and if they were settled they would not in the slightest degree affect the poetical beauty and the human interest of the Sonnets, which, in a strange reductio ad absurdum of eighteenth century commonsense criticism, Hallam thought it impossible not to wish that Shakespere had not written, and which some critics, not perhaps of the least qualified, have regarded as the high-water mark of English, if not of all, poetry.
This latter estimate will only be dismissed as exaggerated by those who are debarred from appreciation by want of sympathy with the subject, or distracted by want of comprehension of it. A harmony of the two chief opposing theories of poetry will teach us that we must demand of the very highest poetry first—the order is not material—a certain quality of expression, and secondly, a certain quality of subject. "What that quality of subject must be has been, as it seems to me, crudely and wrongly stated, but rightly indicated, in Mr. Matthew Arnold's formula of the "Criticism of Life." That is to say, in less debatable words, the greatest poet must show most knowledge of human nature. Now both these conditions are fulfilled in the sonnets of Shakespere with a completeness and intensity impossible to parallel elsewhere. The merits of the formal and expressive part hardly any one will now question; the sonnets may be opened almost at random with the certainty of finding everywhere the phrases, the verses, the passages which almost mechanically recur to our minds when we are asked to illustrate the full poetical capacity and beauty of the English tongue, such as:
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"The painful warrior, famousèd for fight, After a thousand victories once foiled, Is from the book of honour razed quite And all the rest forgot for which he toiled;" |
or
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"When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past;" |
or
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"Was it the proud full sail of his great verse, Bound for the prize of all too precious you?" |
or
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"Then hate me if thou wilt," |
with the whole sonnet which it opens; or