Who lets so fair a house fall to decay.
The word "house" as there used has been interpreted as though used in the sense of the House of York, and so made an implication that his friend was of a lordly line. Such a far-fetched and unusual interpretation should not be adopted unless clearly indicated. And the context clearly indicates that the phrase "so fair a house" is used as a metaphor for the poet's fair and beautiful body. If this inquiry were to be affected by far-drawn or even doubtful interpretations, I might quote from Sonnet LXXXVI. There the poet, referring to his rival, says:
But when your countenance fill'd up his line.
By merely limiting the word countenance to its primary meaning, we may have the inference that his rival's verse was spoken or acted by his friend, and so that his friend was an actor. I do not think, however, that either of the two lines last cited are entitled to any weight as argument, but they illustrate the distinction between lines or Sonnets which may be the basis of surmise or conjecture, and those elsewhere cited, to which two different effects cannot be given without rending their words from their natural meaning.
The Earl of Southampton was born in 1573. He bore an historic name; fields, forests, and castles were his and had come to him from his ancestors; all of England that was most beautiful or most attractive was in the circle in which he moved and to which his presence contributed. In 1595 he appeared in the lists at a tournament in honor of the Queen; in 1596 and 1597 he joined in dangerous and successful naval and military expeditions; in 1598 he was married.[[35]] Is it conceivable that two thousand lines of adulatory poetry could have been written to and of him, and no hint appear of incidents like these? It is simply incredible. What is omitted rather than what is said clearly indicates that the life of the poet's friend presented no such incidents,—indeed no incidents which the poet chronicler of court and camp would interweave in his garlands of loving compliment.
Urging his friend to marry, the poet, comparing the harmony of music to a happy marriage, in Sonnet VIII. says:
Mark how one string, sweet husband to another,
Strikes each in each by mutual ordering;
Resembling sire and child and happy mother,
Who, all in one, one pleasing note do sing:
Whose speechless song, being many, seeming one,
Sings this to thee: "Thou single wilt prove none."
But is it not a little strange that the pen that drew Rosalind and Juliet should have gone no farther, when by a touch he could have filled it with suggestions of the fair, the stately and the titled maidens who were in the court life of that day, and whose names and faces and reputed characters must have been known to the poet, whatever his place or station in London? How would a tracing of a mother, nobly born, or of a lordly but deceased father, of some old castle, of some fair eminence, of some grand forest, or of ancestral oaks shading fair waters, have lightened the picture! And could the poet who gave us the magnificent pictures of English kings and queens, princes and lords—could that poet, writing to and of one of the fairest of the courtly circle of the reign of Elizabeth, so withhold his pen that it gives no hint that his friend was in or of that circle, or any suggestion of his most happy and fortunate surroundings? Surely, in painting so fully the beauties of his friend, the poet would have allowed to appear some hint of the beauty of light and color in which he moved.
I have before me in the book of Mr. Lee, a copy of the picture of the Earl of Southampton painted in Welbeck Abbey. The dress is of the court; and the sword, the armor, the plume and rich drapery all indicate a member of the nobility. Could our great poet in so many lines of extreme compliment and adulation have always omitted any reference to the insignia of rank which were almost a part of the young Earl; and would he always have escaped all reference to coronet or sword, to lands or halls, or to any of the employments or sports, privileges or honors, then much more than now, distinctive of a peer of the realm?