HENRY CONSTABLE
The sonnet-cycle in the hands of Henry Constable seems to have been in the first place rather a record of a succession of "moment's monuments" than a single dramatic scheme, even an embryonic one. The quaint preface found in the Harleian transcript of the Diana shows this, and at the same time tells what freedom was at that period allowed in the structure and dove-tailing of a sonnet-cycle. It is as follows:
"The Sonnets following are divided into 3 parts, each parte contayning 3 several arguments and every argument 7 sonets.
"The first parte is of variable affections of love: wherein the first 7 be of the beginning and byrth of his love; the second 7, of the prayse of his mistresse; the thyrd 7, of severall accidents hapning in the tyme of his love.
"The second is the prayse of perticulars: wherein the first 7 be of the generall honoure of this ile, through the prayses of the heads thereof, the Q. of England and K. of Scots; the second 7 celebrate the memory of perticular ladies whoe the author most honoureth: the thyrd 7 be to the honoure of perticulars, presented upon severall occasions.
"The thyrd parte is tragicall, conteyning only lamentations: wherein the first 7 be complaynts onlye of misfortunes in love, the second 7, funerall sonets of the death of perticulars; the last 7, of the end and death of his love."
The four sonnets to that distinguished "perticular," the King of Scotland, seem to have won for the author a great deal of fame, for Bolton mentions one of them as a witness to his opinion that "noble Henry Constable was a great master in English tongue, nor had any gentleman of our nation a more pure, quick, or higher delivery of conceit." The King himself the poet is said to have met personally when on his propagandist tours in Scotland; for Constable was an ardent Roman Catholic, and spent most of his life in plots for the re-establishment of that faith in England. Among the other "perticulars" addressed, the Queen is of course bounteously favoured, and a number of ladies of her Court are honoured; the series therefore lacks all pretense of unity. In fact, the title of the 1594 edition declares that the "excellent conceitful sonnets of Henry Constable" are "augmented with divers quartorzains of honourable and learned personages;" and Sidney has been found to be one of the "honourable and learned personages" whose works were laid under contribution to make the book; but since the whole first and second decades are the same as in the earlier volume by "H.C." which contained also the King James sonnets attributed by numerous contemporaries to Henry Constable, and since as yet, beside the ten by Sidney, no more of the sonnets have by antiquarian research been traced to their sources in the mazes of Elizabethan common-place books, it seems but fair to leave the Diana of 1594 in the hands of Constable. All three books, the '92 and '94 editions and the manuscript volume, show a like taste for orderly arrangement not found in general in the sonnet-cycles.
Constable was a Cambridge man and was thirty years old when the Diana was first printed. He lived until 1613 and bore an excellent reputation in his day. He was the friend of Ben Jonson, who speaks of his "ambrosaic Muse," of Sidney, Harington, Tofte, and other literary men. If toying with the sonnet in Diana seems to indicate a light and trifling spirit, we have to yield that with Constable as with Fletcher the graver matters of state policy formed the chief interest in life to the author. In Constable's case the interest was religious and the poet was personally a man of devout feeling. Writing from the Tower, where for a time he was detained, he says, "Whether I remain in prison or go out, I have learned to live alone with God." At the conclusion of the third part of the Harleian Miscellany transcript, the author says: "When I had ended this last sonnet, and found that such vain poems as I had by idle hours writ, did amount just to the diametrical number 63, methought it was high time for my folly to die, and to employ the remnant of my wit to other calmer thoughts less sweet and less bitter." It was probably in a mood like this that the poet turned from his devotion to an earthly love and began to write his "Sonnets in honor of God and his Saints." In this group, as in the other, he expresses that passion for beauty characteristic of the renaissance, but here he shows the lack of a clear conception as to where the line should be drawn between earthly and heavenly beauty. In Constable we see the new revelation barely emerging from the darkness, the human hand reaching out in art toward the divine, but not knowing how to take and hold the higher in its grasp. These sonnets are as "conceitful" as the others, but the collection illustrates an early effort to turn the poetic energy into a new field, to broaden the scope of subject-matter possible in sonnet-form. The poet was evidently a close student of the sonnet-structure. He used the Italian and the English form in about an equal number of cases but he experiments on a large variety of rime-arrangements besides.
As to the personality honoured under the name of Diana, there seems to be much obscurity. From the sonnet To his Mistress, we learn that though he addresses several he loves but one.
"Grace full of grace, though in these verses here
My love complains of others than of thee,
Yet thee alone I loved, and they by me,
Thou yet unknown, only mistaken were."