[407] Cf. Sydney Papers, ed. Collins, i. 353. ‘My Lord (of Pembroke) himself with my Lord Harbert (is) come up to see the Queen’ (Rowland Whyte to Sir Robert Sydney, October 8, 1591), and again p. 361 (November 16, 1595); and p. 372 (December 5, 1595). John Chamberlain wrote to Sir Dudley Carleton on August 1, 1599, ‘Young Lord Harbert, Sir Henrie Carie, and Sir William Woodhouse, are all in election at Court, who shall set the best legge foremost.’ Chamberlain’s Letters (Camden Soc.), p. 57
[408] Thomas Sackville, the author of the Induction to The Mirror for Magistrates and other poetical pieces, and part author of Gorboduc, was born plain ‘Thomas Sackville,’ and was ordinarily addressed in youth as ‘Mr. Sackville.’ He wrote all his literary work while he bore that and no other designation. He subsequently abandoned literature for politics, and was knighted and created Lord Buckhurst. Very late in life, in 1604—at the age of sixty-eight—he became Earl of Dorset. A few of his youthful effusions, which bore his early signature, ‘M. [i.e. Mr.] Sackville,’ were reprinted with that signature unaltered in an encyclopædic anthology, England’s Parnassus, which was published, wholly independently of him, in 1600, after he had become Baron Buckhurst. About the same date he was similarly designated Thomas or Mr. Sackville in a reprint, unauthorised by him, of his Induction to The Mirror for Magistrates, which was in the original text ascribed, with perfect correctness, to Thomas or Mr. Sackville. There is clearly no sort of parallel (as has been urged) between such an explicable, and not unwarrantable, metachronism and the misnaming of the Earl of Pembroke ‘Mr. W. H.’ As might be anticipated, persistent research affords no parallel for the latter irregularity.
[409] An examination of a copy of the book in the Bodleian—none is in the British Museum—shows that the dedication is signed J. H., and not, as Mr. Fleay infers, by Thorpe. Thorpe had no concern in this volume.
[410] On January 27, 1607-8, one Sir Henry Colte was indicted for slander in the Star Chamber for addressing a peer, Lord Morley, as ‘goodman Morley.’ A technical defect—the omission of the precise date of the alleged offence—in the bill of indictment led to a dismissal of the cause. See Les Reportes del Cases in Camera Stellata, 1593 to 1609, edited from the manuscript of Henry Hawarde by W. P. Baildon, F.S.A. (privately printed for Alfred Morrison), p. 348.
[411] See pp. 23, 231-2. A tradition has lately sprung up at Wilton to the effect that a letter once existed there in which the Countess of Pembroke bade her son the earl while he was in attendance on James I at Salisbury bring the King to Wilton to witness a performance of As You Like It. The countess is said to have added, ‘We have the man Shakespeare with us.’ No tangible evidence of the existence of the letter is forthcoming, and its tenor stamps it, if it exists, as an ignorant invention. The circumstances under which both King and players visited Wilton in 1603 are completely misrepresented. The Court temporarily occupied Wilton House, and Shakespeare and his comrades were ordered by the officers of the royal household to give a performance there in the same way as they would have been summoned to play before the King had he been at Whitehall. It is hardly necessary to add that the Countess of Pembroke’s mode of referring to literary men is well known: she treated them on terms of equality, and could not in any aberration of mind or temper have referred to Shakespeare as ‘the man Shakespeare.’ Similarly, the present Earl of Pembroke purchased of a London picture-dealer last year what purported to be a portrait of the third Earl of Pembroke, and on the back was pasted a paper, that was represented to date from the seventeenth century, containing some lines from Shakespeare’s Sonnet lxxxi. (9-14), subscribed with the words ‘Shakespeare unto the Earl of Pembroke, 1603’ The ink and handwriting are quite modern, and hardly make pretence to be of old date in the eyes of any one accustomed to study manuscripts. On May 5 of this year some persons interested in the matter, including myself, examined the portrait and the inscription, on the kind invitation of the present Earl, and the inscription was unanimously declared by palmographical experts to be a clumsy forgery unworthy of serious notice.
[414] Cf. the engravings of Simon Pass, Stent, and Vandervoerst, after the portrait by Mytens.
[415] It is unnecessary, after what has been said above (p. 123), to consider seriously the suggestion that the ‘dark lady’ of the sonnets was Mary Fitton, maid of honour to Queen Elizabeth. This frolicsome lady, who was at one time Pembroke’s mistress and bore him a child, has been introduced into a discussion of the sonnets only on the assumption that her lover, Pembroke, was the youth to whom the sonnets were addressed. Lady Newdegate’s recently published Gossip from a Muniment Room, which furnishes for the first time a connected biography of Pembroke’s mistress, adequately disposes of any lingering hope that Shakespeare may have commemorated her in his black-complexioned heroine. Lady Newdegate states that two well-preserved portraits of Mary Fitton remain at Arbury, and that they reveal a lady of fair complexion with brown hair and grey eyes. Family history places the authenticity of the portraits beyond doubt, and the endeavour lately made by Mr. Tyler, the chief champion of the hopeless Fitton theory, to dispute their authenticity is satisfactorily met by Mr. C. O. Bridgeman in an appendix to the second edition of Lady Newdegate’s book. We also learn from Lady Newdegate’s volume that Miss Fitton, during her girlhood, was pestered by the attentions of a middle-aged admirer, a married friend of the family, Sir William Knollys. It has been lamely suggested by some of the supporters of the Pembroke theory that Sir William Knollys was one of the persons named Will who are alleged to be noticed as competitors with Shakespeare and the supposititious ‘Will Herbert’ for ‘the dark lady’s’ favours in the sonnets (cxxxv., cxxxvi., and perhaps clxiii.) But that is a shot wholly out of range. The wording of those sonnets, when it is thoroughly tested, proves beyond reasonable doubt that the poet was the only lover named Will who is represented as courting the disdainful lady of the sonnets, and that no reference whatever is made there to any other person of that Christian name.
[416] Professor Dowden (Sonnets, p. xxxv) writes: ‘It appears from the punning sonnets (cxxxv. and cxliii.) that the Christian name of Shakspere’s friend was the same as his own, Will,’ and thence is deduced the argument that the friend could only be identical with one who, like William Earl of Pembroke, bore that Christian name.
[418a] Ed. Mayor, p. 35.
[418b] Manningham’s Diary, p. 92; cf. Barnabe Barnes’s Odes Pastoral sestine 2: