All these lines are echoes of Petrarch, and Shakespeare and Drayton followed the Italian master’s words more closely than their contemporaries. Cf. Petrarch’s Sonnet cxliii. (to Laura alive), or Sonnet lxxxi. (to Laura after death); the latter begins:
Dicemi spesso il mio fidato speglio,
L’animo stanco e la cangiata scorza
E la scemata mia destrezza e forza:
Non ti nasconder più: tu se’ pur veglio.
(i.e. ‘My faithful glass, my weary spirit and my wrinkled skin, and my decaying wit and strength repeatedly tell me: “It cannot longer be hidden from you, you are old.”’)
[88] The Sonnets of Sidney, Watson, Daniel, and Constable long circulated in manuscript, and suffered much the same fate as Shakespeare’s at the hands of piratical publishers. After circulating many years in manuscript, Sidney’s Sonnets were published in 1591 by an irresponsible trader, Thomas Newman, who in his self-advertising dedication wrote of the collection that it had been widely ‘spread abroad in written copies,’ and had ‘gathered much corruption by ill writers’ [i.e. copyists]. Constable produced in 1592 a collection of twenty sonnets in a volume which he entitled ‘Diana.’ This was an authorised publication. But in 1594 a printer and a publisher, without Constable’s knowledge or sanction, reprinted these sonnets and scattered them through a volume of nearly eighty miscellaneous sonnets by Sidney and many other hands; the adventurous publishers bestowed on their medley the title of ‘Diana,’ which Constable had distinctively attached to his own collection. Daniel suffered in much the same way. See Appendix IX. for further notes on the subject. Proofs of the commonness of the habit of circulating literature in manuscript abound. Fulke Greville, writing to Sidney’s father-in-law, Sir Francis Walsingham, in 1587, expressed regret that uncorrected manuscript copies of the then unprinted Arcadia were ‘so common.’ In 1591 Gabriel Cawood, the publisher of Robert Southwell’s Mary Magdalen’s Funeral Tears, wrote that manuscript copies of the work had long flown about ‘fast and false.’ Nash, in the preface to his Terrors of the Night, 1594, described how a copy of that essay, which a friend had ‘wrested’ from him, had ‘progressed [without his authority] from one scrivener’s shop to another, and at length grew so common that it was ready to be hung out for one of their figures [i.e. shop-signs], like a pair of indentures.’
[89a] Cf. Sonnet lxix. 12:
To thy fair flower add the rank smell of weeds.
[89b] For other instances of the application of this epithet to Shakespeare’s work, see p. 179, note 1.
[90] The actor Alleyn paid fivepence for a copy in that month (cf. Warner’s Dulwich MSS. p. 92).
[91] The chief editions of the sonnets that have appeared, with critical apparatus, of late years are those of Professor Dowden (1875, reissued 1896), Mr. Thomas Tyler (1890), and Mr. George Wyndham, M.P. (1898). Mr. Gerald Massey’s Secret Drama of Shakespeare’s Sonnets—the text of the poems with a full discussion—appeared in a second revised edition in 1888. I regret to find myself in more or less complete disagreement with all these writers, although I am at one with Mr. Massey in identifying the young man to whom many of the sonnets were addressed with the Earl of Southampton. A short bibliography of the works advocating the theory that the sonnets were addressed to William, third Earl of Pembroke, is given in Appendix VI., ‘Mr. William Herbert,’ note 1.
[93] It has been wrongly inferred that Shakespeare asserts in Sonnets cxxxv-vi. and cxliii. that the young friend to whom he addressed some of the sonnets bore his own christian name of Will (see for a full examination of these sonnets Appendix VIII.) Further, it has been fantastically suggested that the line (xx. 7) describing the youth as ‘A man in hue, all hues in his controlling’ (i.e. a man in colour or complexion whose charms are so varied as to appear to give his countenance control of, or enable it to assume, all manner of fascinating hues or complexions), and other applications to the youth of the ordinary word ‘hue,’ imply that his surname was Hughes. There is no other pretence of argument for the conclusion, which a few critics have hazarded in all seriousness, that the friend’s name was William Hughes. There was a contemporary musician called William Hughes, but no known contemporary of the name, either in age or position in life, bears any resemblance to the young man who is addressed by Shakespeare in his sonnets.