The title page runs: Shakspeare’s Sonnets, never before imprinted, 4to, 1609. G. Eld for T. T.
[494] This has been done in a late publication, “Shakspeare’s Autobiographical poems, by George Armitage Brown” (1838). It might have occurred to any attentive reader, but I do not know that the analysis was ever so completely made before, though almost every one has been aware that different persons are addressed in the former and latter part of the sonnets. Mr. Brown’s work did not fall into my hands till nearly the time that these sheets passed through the press, which I mention on account of some coincidences of opinion, especially as to Shakspeare’s knowledge of Latin.
The person whom they address. 49. The notion that a woman was their general object is totally untenable, and it is strange that Coleridge should have entertained it.[495] Those that were evidently addressed to a woman, the person above hinted, are by much the smaller part of the whole, but twenty-eight out of one hundred and fifty-four. And this mysterious Mr. W. H. must be presumed to be the idolised friend of Shakspeare. But who could he be? No one recorded in literary history or anecdote answers the description. But if we seize a clue which innumerable passages give us, and suppose that they allude to a youth of high rank as well as personal beauty and accomplishment, in whose favour and intimacy, according to the base prejudices of the world, a player and a poet, though he were the author of Macbeth, might be thought honoured, something of the strangeness, as it appears to us, of Shakspeare’s humiliation in addressing him as a being before whose feet he crouched, whose frown he feared, whose injuries, and those of the most insulting kind, the seduction of the mistress to whom we have alluded, he felt and bewailed without resenting; something, I say, of the strangeness of this humiliation, and at best it is but little, may be lightened and in a certain sense rendered intelligible. And it has been ingeniously conjectured within a few years by inquirers independent of each other, that William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, born in 1580, and afterwards a man of noble and gallant character, though always of a licentious life, was shadowed under the initials of Mr. W. H. This hypothesis is not strictly proved, but sufficiently so, in my opinion, to demand our assent.[496]
[495] “It seems to me that the sonnets could only have come from a man deeply in love, and in love with a woman; and there is one sonnet which, from its incongruity, I take to be a purposed blind.” Table Talk, vol. ii., p. 180. This sonnet the editor supposes to be the twentieth, which certainly could not have been addressed to a woman; but the proof is equally strong as to most of the rest. Coleridge’s opinion is absolutely untenable; nor do I conceive that any one else is likely to maintain it after reading the sonnets of Shakspeare; but to those who have not done this the authority may justly seem imposing.
[496] In the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1832, p. 217, et post, it will be seen that this occurred both to Mr. Boaden and Mr. Heywood Bright. And it does not appear that Mr. Brown, author of the work above-quoted, had any knowledge of their priority.
Drake has fixed on Lord Southampton as the object of these sonnets, induced probably by the tradition of his friendship with Shakspeare, and by the latter’s having dedicated to him his Venus and Adonis, as well as by what is remarkable on the face of the series of sonnets, that Shakspeare looked up to his friend “with reverence and homage.” But, unfortunately, this was only the reverence and homage of an inferior to one of high rank, and not such as the virtues of Southampton might have challenged. Proofs of the low moral character of “Mr. W. H.” are continual. It was also impossible that Lord Southampton could be called “beauteous and lovely youth,” or “sweet boy.” Mrs. Jameson, in her “Loves of the Poets,” has adopted the same hypothesis, but is forced in consequence to suppose some of the earlier sonnets to be addressed to a woman.
Pembroke succeeded to his father in 1601: I incline to think that the sonnets were written about that time, some probably earlier, some later. That they were the same as Meres, in 1598, has mentioned among the compositions of Shakspeare, his “sugred sonnets among his private friends,” I do not believe, both on account of the date, and from the peculiarly personal allusions they contain.
50. Notwithstanding the frequent beauties of these sonnets, the pleasure of their perusal is greatly diminished by these circumstances; and it is impossible not to wish that Shakspeare had never written them. There is a weakness and folly in all excessive and misplaced affection, which is not redeemed by the touches of nobler sentiments that abound in this long series of sonnets. But there are also faults of a merely critical nature. The obscurity is often such as only conjecture can penetrate; the strain of tenderness and adoration would be too monotonous, were it less unpleasing; and so many frigid conceits are scattered around, that we might almost fancy the poet to have written without genuine emotion, did not such a host of other passages attest the contrary.
Sonnets of Drummond and others. 51. The sonnets of Drummond, of Hawthornden, the most celebrated in that class of poets, have obtained, probably, as much praise as they deserve.[497] But they are polished and elegant, free from conceit and bad taste, in pure, unblemished English; some are pathetic or tender in sentiment, and if they do not show much originality, at least would have acquired a fair place among the Italians of the sixteenth century. Those of Daniel, of Drayton, and of Sir William Alexander, afterwards Earl of Stirling, are perhaps hardly inferior. Some may doubt, however, whether the last poet should be placed on such a level.[498] But the difficulty of finding the necessary rhymes in our language has caused most who have attempted the sonnet to swerve from laws which cannot be transgressed, at least to the degree they have often dared, without losing the unity for which that complex mechanism was contrived. Certainly, three quatrains of alternate rhymes, succeeded by a couplet, which Drummond, like many other English poets, has sometimes given us, is the very worst form of the sonnet, even if, in deference to a scanty number of Italian precedents, we allow it to pass as a sonnet at all.[499] We possess, indeed, noble poetry in the form of sonnet; yet with us it seems more fitted for grave than amatory composition; in the latter we miss the facility and grace of our native English measures, the song, the madrigal, or the ballad.
[497] I concur in this with Mr. Campbell, iv., 343. Mr. Southey thinks Drummond “has deserved the high reputation he has obtained;” which seems to say the same thing, but is, in fact, different. He observes that Drummond “frequently borrows and sometimes translates from the Italian and Spanish poets.” Southey’s British Poets, p. 798. The furious invective of Gifford against Drummond, for having written private memoranda of his conversations with Ben Jonson, which he did not publish, and which, for aught we know, were perfectly faithful, is absurd. Anyone else would have been thankful for so much literary anecdote.