To witness duty, not to show my wit,
Duty so great, which wit so poor as mine
May make seem bare, in wanting words to show it."
And there is much in the Sonnets which can be made to coincide with what we know of Southampton. But, as we push inquiry, difficulties of all kinds begin to swarm in on us. The first is, as in the case of Pembroke, with the dedication. To say nothing of the fact that "W. H." is not "H. W."—the possibility of the appellation of "Mr." being applied to one who had been an Earl since 1581, and who had twice been addressed in dedications by his full titles, and that by Shakespeare himself, is a wholly inadmissible hypothesis. To argue that this was merely "a blind," is simply to beg the question. If the Sonnets were addressed to Southampton, they must have been written between 1593 and 1598. In 1593 Southampton was in his twenty-first year, in 1598 in his twenty-sixth; Shakespeare, respectively, in his thirty-first and thirty-fifth year. Now, what is especially emphasized in the sonnets is the youthfulness of the young man to whom they are dedicated, and the advanced age of the poet. In Sonnet cviii. the youth is addressed as "a sweet boy," in cxxvi. as "a lovely boy," in liv. as "a beauteous and lovely youth"; in xcv. his "budding name" is referred to, while the poet speaks of himself as "old," as "beaten and chopped with tanned antiquity," as being "with Time's injurious hand crushed and o'erworn." And so, as has been more than once pointed out, we have this anomaly—a man of thirty-four describing himself as a thing of "tanned antiquity" in writing to "a sweet and lovely boy" of twenty-five. No one could have been less like the effeminate youth of the Sonnets than Southampton. All we know about him, including his portraits, indicates that he was eminently masculine and manly. Again, it is matter of history that he greatly distinguished himself on the Azores expedition in 1597, acquitting himself with so much gallantry that, during the voyage, he was knighted by Essex. To this expedition, which must have involved one of those absences of which we hear so much in the Sonnets, to this exploit and this honour, which afforded so much opportunity for peculiarly acceptable compliment, Shakespeare makes no reference at all. There is nothing to indicate that the youth of the Sonnets had gained any military or political distinction, had taken any part in public life, or had ever been absent from England. To assume with Mr. Lee that the Sonnets were written in or before 1594, and therefore before Southampton had become distinguished, is to involve ourselves in inextricable difficulties. Even Mr. Lee admits that Sonnet cvii. must have reference to the death of Elizabeth in 1603. With regard to the supposed references to Southampton's relations with Elizabeth Vernon, no certain, or, to speak more accurately, no even plausible inferences can be drawn in any particular: all that they can be reduced to are degrees of improbability.
If, again, we accept the theory of Tyrwhitt and Malone, supported by Mr. Butler, and suppose that W. H. was some obscure person, we are proceeding on mere hypothesis, and a hypothesis seriously shaken by the plain meaning expressed in Sonnets xxxvi., xxxvii., and cxxiv.
The enigma of these Sonnets is, we repeat, as insoluble now as it was when inquiry was first directed to them. Whether they are to be regarded as autobiographical, as dramatic studies, as a mixture of both, as a collection of miscellaneous poems, as written to order for others, as mere exercises in the sonnet-cycle, or as all of these things, is alike uncertain. Our knowledge of the time of their composition begins and ends with the facts, that some of them were, presumably, in circulation in or before 1598, that two of them had certainly been composed in or before 1599, and that all of them had been written by 1609. The rest is mere conjecture; and on mere conjecture and mere hypothesis is based every attempt to solve their mystery. If certainty about them can ever be arrived at, it can only be attained by evidence of which, as yet, we have not even an inkling. The probability is, that it was Shakespeare's intention, or rather Thorpe's intention, to baffle curiosity, and, except in the judgment of fanatics, he has certainly succeeded in doing so.
For our own part we are very much inclined to suspect, that they owed their origin to the fashion of composing sonnet-cycles, that those cycles suggested their themes and gave them the ply; that the beautiful youth, the rival poet, and the dark lady are pure fictions of the imagination; and that these poems are autobiographical only in the sense in which Venus and Adonis, the Rape of Lucrece, Romeo and Juliet and Othello are autobiographical.