Many besides the ‘dedicatory’ sonnets are addressed to a handsome youth of wealth and rank, for whom the poet avows ‘love,’ in the Elizabethan sense of friendship. [136] Although no specific reference is made outside the twenty ‘dedicatory’ sonnets to the youth as a literary patron, and the clues to his identity are elsewhere vaguer, there is good ground for the conclusion that the sonnets of disinterested love or friendship also have Southampton for their subject. The sincerity of the poet’s sentiment is often open to doubt in these poems, but they seem to illustrate a real intimacy subsisting between Shakespeare and a young Mæcenas.
Extravagances of literary compliment.
Extravagant compliment—‘gross painting’ Shakespeare calls it—was more conspicuous in the intercourse of patron and client during the last years of Elizabeth’s reign than in any other epoch. For this result the sovereign herself was in part responsible. Contemporary schemes of literary compliment seemed infected by the feigned accents of amorous passion and false rhapsodies on her physical beauty with which men of letters servilely sought to satisfy the old Queen’s incurable greed of flattery. [137] Sir
Philip Sidney described with admirable point the adulatory excesses to which less exalted patrons were habituated by literary dependents. He gave the warning that as soon as a man showed interest in poetry or its producers, poets straightway pronounced him ‘to be most fair, most rich, most wise, most all.’ ‘You shall dwell upon superlatives . . . Your soule shall be placed with Dante’s Beatrice.’ [138a] The warmth of colouring which distinguishes many of the sonnets that Shakespeare, under the guise of disinterested friendship, addressed to the youth can be matched at nearly all points in the adulation that patrons were in the habit of receiving from literary dependents in the style that Sidney described. [138b]
Patrons habitually addressed in affectionate terms.
Shakespeare assured his friend that he could never grow old (civ.), that the finest types of beauty and chivalry in mediæval romance lived again in him (cvi.), that absence from him was misery, and that his affection for him was unalterable. Hundreds of poets openly
gave the like assurances to their patrons. Southampton was only one of a crowd of Mæcenases whose panegyrists, writing without concealment in their own names, credited them with every perfection of mind and body, and ‘placed them,’ in Sidney’s apt phrase, ‘with Dante’s “Beatrice.”’
Illustrations of the practice abound. Matthew Roydon wrote of his patron, Sir Philip Sidney:
His personage seemed most divine,
A thousand graces one might count
Upon his lovely cheerful eyne.
To heare him speak and sweetly smile
You were in Paradise the while.
Edmund Spenser in a fine sonnet told his patron, Admiral Lord Charles Howard, that ‘his good personage and noble deeds’ made him the pattern to the present age of the old heroes of whom ‘the antique poets’ were ‘wont so much to sing.’ This compliment, which Shakespeare turns to splendid account in Sonnet cvi., recurs constantly in contemporary sonnets of adulation. [140a] Ben Jonson apostrophised the Earl of Desmond as ‘my best-best lov’d.’ Campion told Lord Walden, the Earl of Suffolk’s undistinguished heir, that although his muse sought to express his love, ‘the admired virtues’ of the patron’s youth