other scaled, but as a whole reflecting the varied features of the sonnetteering vogue. Apostrophes to metaphysical abstractions, vivid picturings of the beauties of nature, adulation of a patron, idealisation of a protégé’s regard for a nobleman in the figurative language of amorous passion, amiable compliments on a woman’s hair or touch on the virginals, and vehement denunciation of the falseness and frailty of womankind—all appear as frequently in contemporary collections of sonnets as in Shakespeare’s. He borrows very many of his competitors’ words and thoughts, but he so fused them with his fancy as often to transfigure them. Genuine emotion or the writer’s personal experience very rarely inspired the Elizabethan sonnet, and Shakespeare’s sonnets proved no exception to the rule. A personal note may have escaped him involuntarily in the sonnets in which he gives voice to a sense of melancholy and self-remorse, but his dramatic instinct never slept, and there is no proof that he is doing more in those sonnets than produce dramatically the illusion of a personal confession. Only in one scattered series of six sonnets, where he introduced a topic, unknown to other sonnetteers, of a lover’s supersession by his friend in a mistress’s graces, does he seem to show independence of his comrades and draw directly on an incident in his own life, but even there the emotion is wanting in seriousness. The sole biographical inference deducible from the sonnets is that at one time in his career Shakespeare disdained no weapon of flattery in an endeavour to monopolise the bountiful patronage of a young man of rank. External evidence agrees with
internal evidence in identifying the belauded patron with the Earl of Southampton, and the real value to a biographer of Shakespeare’s sonnets is the corroboration they offer of the ancient tradition that the Earl of Southampton, to whom his two narrative poems were openly dedicated, gave Shakespeare at an early period of his literary career help and encouragement, which entitles the Earl to a place in the poet’s biography resembling that filled by the Duke Alfonso d’Este in the biography of Ariosto, or like that filled by Margaret, duchess of Savoy, in the biography of Ronsard.
XI—THE DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER
‘Midsummer Night’s Dream.’
But, all the while that Shakespeare was fancifully assuring his patron
[How] to no other pass my verses tend
Than of your graces and your gifts to tell,
his dramatic work was steadily advancing. To the winter season of 1595 probably belongs ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ [161] The comedy may well have been written to celebrate a marriage—perhaps the marriage of the universal patroness of poets, Lucy Harington, to Edward Russell, third earl of Bedford, on December 12, 1594; or that of William Stanley, earl of Derby, at Greenwich on January 24, 1594-5. The elaborate compliment to the Queen, ‘a fair vestal throned by the west’ (II. i. 157 seq.), was at once an acknowledgment of past marks of royal favour and an invitation for their extension to the future. Oberon’s fanciful description (II. ii. 148-68) of the spot where he saw the little western flower called ‘Love-in-idleness’ that he bids Puck fetch for him, has been interpreted as a reminiscence of one of the scenic pageants with
which the Earl of Leicester entertained Queen Elizabeth on her visit to Kenilworth in 1575. [162] The whole play is in the airiest and most graceful vein of comedy. Hints for the story can be traced to a variety of sources—to Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale,’ to Plutarch’s ‘Life of Theseus,’ to Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ (bk. iv.), and to the story of Oberon, the fairy-king, in the French mediæval romance of ‘Huon of Bordeaux,’ of which an English translation by Lord Berners was first printed in 1534. The influence of John Lyly is perceptible in the raillery in which both mortals and immortals indulge. In the humorous presentation of the play of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ by the ‘rude mechanicals’ of Athens, Shakespeare improved upon a theme which he had already employed in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost.’ But the final scheme of the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ is of the author’s freshest invention, and by endowing—practically for the first time in literature—the phantoms of the fairy world with a genuine and a sustained dramatic interest, Shakespeare may be said to have conquered a new realm for art.
‘All’s Well.’
More sombre topics engaged him in the comedy of ‘All’s Well that Ends Well,’ which may be tentatively assigned to 1595. Meres, writing three years later, attributed to Shakespeare a piece called ‘Love’s Labour’s Won.’ This title, which is not otherwise known, may well be applied