No longer mourn for me when I am dead,
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile earth, with vilest worms to dwell:
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
O if (I say) you look upon this verse,
When I perhaps compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse;
But let your love even with my life decay:
Lest the wise world should look into your moan,
And mock you with me after I am gone.
The period assigned to the composition of these Sonnets, and the attachment which inspired them, is the time when Shakspeare was living a wild and irregular life, between the court and the theatre, after his flight from Stratford. He had previously married, at the age of seventeen, Judith Hathaway, who was eight or ten years older than himself: he returned to his native town, after having sounded all depths of life, of nature, of passion, and ended his days as the respected father of a family, in calm, unostentatious privacy.
One thing I will confess:—It is natural to feel an intense and insatiable curiosity relative to great men, a curiosity and interest for which nothing can be too minute, too personal.—And yet when I had ransacked all that had ever been written, discovered, or surmised, relative to Shakspeare's private life, for the purpose of throwing some light upon his Sonnets, I felt no gratification, no thankfulness to those whose industry had raked up the very few particulars which can be known. It is too much, and it is not enough: it disappoints us in one point of view—it is superfluous in another: what need to surround with common-place, trivial associations, registers of wills and genealogies, and I know not what,—the mighty spirit who in dying left behind him not merely a name and fame, but a perpetual being, a presence and a power, identified with our nature, diffused through all time, and ruling the heart and the fancy with an uncontrollable and universal sway!
I rejoice that the name of no one woman is popularly identified with that of Shakspeare. He belongs to us all!—the creator of Desdemona, and Juliet, and Ophelia, and Imogen, and Viola, and Constance, and Cornelia, and Rosalind, and Portia, was not the poet of one woman, but the Poet of Womankind.
FOOTNOTES:
[94] She was the grandmother of Lady Russell.
[95] Elizabeth Vernon was first cousin to Essex. "Was it treason?" asks Essex indignantly, in one of his eloquent letters; "Was it treason in my Lord of Southampton to marry my poor kinswoman, that neither long imprisonment, nor any punishment besides that hath been usual in such cases can satisfy or appease?"
[96] Sonnets 127, 130
[97] Sonnet 128.