beauty. In the two remaining sonnets Shakespeare addresses the woman (cxxxiii. and cxxxiv.), and he rebukes her for having enslaved not only himself but ‘his next self’—his friend. Shakespeare, in his denunciation elsewhere of a mistress’s disdain of his advances, assigns her blindness, like all the professional sonnetteers, to no better defined cause than the perversity and depravity of womankind. In these six sonnets alone does he categorically assign his mistress’s alienation to the fascinations of a dear friend or hint at such a cause for his mistress’s infidelity. The definite element of intrigue that is developed here is not found anywhere else in the range of Elizabethan sonnet-literature. The character of the innovation and its treatment seem only capable of explanation by regarding the topic as a reflection of Shakespeare’s personal experience. But how far he is sincere in his accounts of his sorrow in yielding his mistress to his friend in order to retain the friendship of the latter must be decided by each reader for himself. If all the words be taken literally, there is disclosed an act of self-sacrifice that it is difficult to parallel or explain. But it remains very doubtful if the affair does not rightly belong to the annals of gallantry. The sonnetteer’s complacent condonation of the young man’s offence chiefly suggests the deference that was essential to the maintenance by a dependent of peaceful relations with a self-willed and self-indulgent patron. Southampton’s sportive and lascivious temperament might easily impel him to divert to himself the attention of an attractive woman by whom he saw that his poet was fascinated,
and he was unlikely to tolerate any outspoken protest on the part of his protégé. There is no clue to the lady’s identity, and speculation on the topic is useless. She may have given Shakespeare hints for his pictures of the ‘dark lady,’ but he treats that lady’s obduracy conventionally, and his vituperation of her sheds no light on the personal history of the mistress who left him for his friend.
‘Willobie his Avisa.’
The emotions roused in Shakespeare by the episode, even if potent at the moment, were not likely to be deep-seated or enduring. And it is possible that a half-jesting reference, which would deprive Shakespeare’s amorous adventure of serious import, was made to it by a literary comrade in a poem that was licensed for publication on September 3, 1594, and was published immediately under the title of ‘Willobie his Avisa, or the True Picture of a Modest Maid and of a Chaste and Constant Wife.’ [155] In this volume, which mainly consists of seventy-two cantos in varying numbers of six-line stanzas, the chaste heroine, Avisa, holds converse—in the opening section as a maid, and in the later section as a wife—with a series of passionate adorers. In every case she firmly repulses their advances. Midway through the book its alleged author—Henry Willobie—is introduced in his own person as an ardent admirer, and the last twenty-nine of the cantos rehearse his woes and Avisa’s obduracy. To this section there is
prefixed an argument in prose (canto xliv.) It is there stated that Willobie, ‘being suddenly affected with the contagion of a fantastical wit at the first sight of Avisa, pineth a while in secret grief. At length, not able any longer to endure the burning heat of so fervent a humour, [he] bewrayeth the secrecy of his disease unto his familiar friend W. S., who not long before had tried the courtesy of the like passion and was now newly recovered of the like infection. Yet [W. S.], finding his friend let blood in the same vein, took pleasure for a time to see him bleed, and instead of stopping the issue, he enlargeth the wound with the sharp razor of willing conceit,’ encouraging Willobie to believe that Avisa would ultimately yield ‘with pains, diligence, and some cost in time.’ ‘The miserable comforter’ [W. S.], the passage continues, was moved to comfort his friend ‘with an impossibility,’ for one of two reasons. Either ‘he now would secretly laugh at his friend’s folly’ because he ‘had given occasion not long before unto others to laugh at his own.’ Or ‘he would see whether another could play his part better than himself, and, in viewing after the course of this loving comedy,’ would ‘see whether it would sort to a happier end for this new actor than it did for the old player. But at length this comedy was like to have grown to a tragedy by the weak and feeble estate that H. W. was brought unto,’ owing to Avisa’s unflinching rectitude. Happily, ‘time and necessity’ effected a cure. In two succeeding cantos in verse W. S. is introduced in dialogue with Willobie, and he gives him, in oratio recta, light-hearted and mocking counsel
which Willobie accepts with results disastrous to his mental health.
Identity of initials, on which the theory of Shakespeare’s identity with H. W.’s unfeeling adviser mainly rests, is not a strong foundation, [157] and doubt is justifiable as to whether the story of ‘Avisa’ and her lovers is not fictitious. In a preface signed Hadrian Dorell, the writer, after mentioning that the alleged author (Willobie) was dead, discusses somewhat enigmatically whether or no the work is ‘a poetical fiction.’ In a new edition of 1596 the same editor decides the question in the affirmative. But Dorell, while making this admission, leaves untouched the curious episode of ‘W. S.’ The mention of ‘W. S.’ as ‘the old player,’ and the employment of theatrical imagery in discussing his relations with Willobie, must be coupled with the fact that Shakespeare, at a date when mentions of him in print were rare, was eulogised by name as the author of ‘Lucrece’ in some prefatory verses to the volume. From such considerations the theory of ‘W. S.’s’ identity with Willobie’s acquaintance acquires substance. If we assume that it was Shakespeare who took a roguish delight in watching his friend Willobie suffer the disdain of ‘chaste Avisa’ because he had ‘newly recovered’ from the effects of
a like experience, it is clear that the theft of Shakespeare’s mistress by another friend did not cause him deep or lasting distress. The allusions that were presumably made to the episode by the author of ‘Avisa’ bring it, in fact, nearer the confines of comedy than of tragedy.
Summary of conclusions respecting the sonnets.
The processes of construction which are discernible in Shakespeare’s sonnets are thus seen to be identical with those that are discernible in the rest of his literary work. They present one more proof of his punctilious regard for the demands of public taste, and of his marvellous genius and skill in adapting and transmuting for his own purposes the labours of other workers in the field that for the moment engaged his attention. Most of Shakespeare’s sonnets were produced in 1594 under the incitement of that freakish rage for sonnetteering which, taking its rise in Italy and sweeping over France on its way to England, absorbed for some half-dozen years in this country a greater volume of literary energy than has been applied to sonnetteering within the same space of time here or elsewhere before or since. The thousands of sonnets that were circulated in England between 1591 and 1597 were of every literary quality, from sublimity to inanity, and they illustrated in form and topic every known phase of sonnetteering activity. Shakespeare’s collection, which was put together at haphazard and published surreptitiously many years after the poems were written, was a medley, at times reaching heights of literary excellence that none