Part 14

The problem presented in these Sonnets is undoubtedly the most fascinating problem in all literature, and it is as exasperating as it is fascinating. It appears to be so simple, it seems constantly to be on the verge of its solution, and yet the moment we get beyond a certain point in inquiry, the more complex its apparent simplicity is discovered to be, the more hopeless all prospect of explaining the enigma. Take the difficulty of assuming, what seems to be obvious, that they are autobiographical. Here we have the poet, and that poet Shakespeare, admitting the world into the innermost secrets of his life, taking his contemporaries, without the least reserve, into his confidence, inviting and assisting them to the study of his own morbid anatomy, and, in a word, stripping himself bare with all the shameless abandon of Jean Jacques and of Casanova. Everything that we know of Shakespeare seems to discountenance the probability of his having any such intention. No anecdote, with the smallest pretence to authenticity, couples his name with scandal. The theory which identifies him with the W. S. of Willobie’s _Avisa_ has no real basis to rest on, and without corroboration is absolutely inadmissible as evidence. Whatever Shakespeare’s private life may have been, it is quite clear that he carefully regarded the decencies, and would have been the last man in the world to pose publicly in the character presented to us in the Sonnets. If the poems are autobiographical, we can only conclude that they were published without his consent, and even to his great annoyance. This may certainly have been the case, and is indeed often assumed to have been so. But even then it is, to say the least, curious, that there should have been no tradition about the extraordinary story which they tell, especially considering the distinction of the _dramatis personæ_. Assuming that the youth, who is their hero, was a real person, he must, judging from Sonnets xxxvi., xxxvii. and cxxiv., have been conspicuous in the society of that time; assuming the rival poet to be a real person, he must have been equally conspicuous in another sphere, while Shakespeare himself, at the time the Sonnets were published, was the most distinguished poet and playwright in London. It is, therefore, extraordinary that all traces of an affair in which persons of so much eminence were involved, and which would have furnished scandal-mongers with the topics in which such gossips most delight, should have entirely disappeared. We must either conclude that posterity has been very unfortunate in the loss of records which would have thrown light on the matter, or that Shakespeare’s contemporaries knew nothing of the facts, and contented themselves with the poetry; or, lastly, that what we may call the fable of the Sonnets, the drama in which W. H., “the dark lady,” and the rival poet play their parts, is as fictitious as the plot of _The Midsummer Night’s Dream_ or _The Tempest_.

It is not our intention to support any of the numerous theories which pretend to give us the key to these Sonnets, still less to propose any new one, but simply to show that the enigma presented by them is as insoluble as ever, and that all attempts to throw light on it have served to effect nothing more than to make darkness visible and confusion worse confounded. Let us briefly review the facts. In 1609, Thomas Thorpe, a well-known Elizabethan bookseller, published a small quarto volume, entitled _Shakespeare’s Sonnets_, having apparently not obtained them from the poet himself, and to this volume was prefixed the following dedication:--“To the onlie begetter of these ensuing Sonnets, Mr. W. H., all happiness and that eternitie promised by our ever-living poet wisheth the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth. T. T.” Here begins and ends all that is certainly known about W. H. and his relation to these poems. No one knows who he was; no one knows what is exactly meant by the word “begetter,” whether it is to be taken in the sense of inspirer, whether that is to say W. H. is the youth celebrated in the Sonnets--“the master-mistress” of the poet’s passion, or whether it simply means the person who got or procured the poems for Thorpe,--in which case the identification of the initials is of no consequence, unless we are to suppose that the youth who inspired them presented them to Thorpe. Mr. Sidney Lee, in his very able paper in the _Fortnightly Review_ for February, 1898, and in his Life of Shakespeare, argues that there is no proof that the youth of the Sonnets was named “Will,” though this has always been assumed to be the case. The evidence on which the point must be argued will be found in the puns on “Will” in Sonnets cxxxiv.-vi. and cxliii. It seems to us, we must own, that the balance of probability, though not certainly in favour of the affirmative, decidedly inclines towards it. Granting then,--for it is, after all, only an hypothesis,--that the initials W. H. are those of the youth celebrated in the Sonnets, to whom are they to be assigned? The youth, whoever he was, is represented as being in a social position superior to that of the poet; he has apparently rank and title; he has wealth; he is young and eminently handsome, his beauty being of a delicate, effeminate cast; he is highly cultivated and accomplished; he is on terms of the closest intimacy with the poet, by whom he is passionately beloved; he lives a free, loose life, and he intrigues with his friend’s mistress.

Passing by all preposterous theories about William Harte, William Hughes, William Himself and the like, we come to the two names which seem worth serious consideration, William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, and Henry Wriothesly, third Earl of Southampton. The Pembroke theory, with Mr. Thomas Tyler’s corollary identifying the “dark lady” with Mary Fitton, has been adopted by Dr. Brandes in his work on Shakespeare just published. But the difficulties in the way of accepting it are insuperable. They have been admirably discussed by Mr. Sidney Lee in the article to which we have referred. In the first place, while Shakespeare must have been on terms of more than brotherly intimacy with the youth of the Sonnets, there is no evidence at all that he had ever been in any other relation with the Earl than in the ordinary one of servant and patron. The words of Heminge and Condell, in the dedication of the first folio to Pembroke and his brother, merely state that they had both of them “prosequted” him with favour; in other words, been to him what they had been to many other dramatists and men of letters; and that is the only evidence of any connection between Shakespeare and Pembroke. Tradition was certainly silent about any relations between them, for Aubrey, as Mr. Lee has pointed out, though he has collected much information about both, says nothing about their acquaintanceship, though he mentions Pembroke’s connection with Massinger, and Southampton’s with Shakespeare. But Thorpe’s dedication is conclusive against Pembroke. In 1609, Pembroke, who had succeeded to the title on the death of his father in January, 1601, was Lord Chamberlain, a Knight of the Garter, and one of the most distinguished noblemen in England. Is it credible that Thorpe would address him as Mr. W. H., more especially as in the other works which he inscribed to him,--and he inscribed several,--he is careful to give him all his titles, and to address him with the most fulsome servility? Again, Pembroke, as Mr. Lee points out, was never a “Mister” at all. As the eldest son of an earl, he was designated by courtesy Lord Herbert, and as Lord Herbert he is always spoken of in contemporary records. The appellation “Mr.” was not, as Mr. Lee observes, used loosely, as it is now, and could never have been applied to any nobleman, whether holding his title by right or by courtesy. Whatever allowance may be made for a poet’s passion and fancy, some weight must be attached to the insistence made in the Sonnets on the youth’s delicate and effeminate beauty. It is true that we have no portraits of Pembroke before he arrived at middle age, but those portraits justify us in concluding that he could never, at any time, have been distinguished by beauty of the type indicated in the poems.

Against all this the advocates of the Pembroke theory have nothing to place but conjectures, a series of insignificant coincidences and the assumption that the woman in the Sonnets is to be identified with the woman who bore Herbert a child, Mary Fitton. The publication of Sonnet xliv. by Jaggard, in 1599, shows that the intrigue between the youth and the dark lady, which is the central event of the Sonnets, was already, and had probably been for some time, in full career, while there is no evidence that Pembroke was involved with Mary Fitton before the summer of 1600. But what finally disposes of this theory is the testimony afforded by Lady Newdigate-Newdegate’s recently published _Gossip from a Muniment Room_. Indispensable requisites in the lady of the Sonnets are, that she should be dark, a “black beauty” with “eyes raven black,” with hair which resembles “black wires,” and that she should be a married woman; but the portraits--and there are two of them--of Mary Fitton, show that she had a fair complexion, with brown hair and grey eyes; and she remained unmarried, until long after her connection with Pembroke had ceased.

The theory which identifies W. H. with the Earl of Southampton is slightly more plausible, but the difficulties in the way of accepting it are, in truth, equally insuperable. This theory has at least one great point in its favour. Shakespeare was acquainted, and it may be inferred intimately acquainted, with Southampton, as the dedications of _Venus and Adonis_ and the _Rape of Lucrece_ indicate. Of his affection and respect for this nobleman he has left an expression almost as remarkable as the language of the sonnets. “The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end.... What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours: being part in all I have devoted yours. Were my worth greater, my duty would show greater.” This bears a singularly close resemblance to Sonnet xxvi.,--

“Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit, To thee I send this written embassage To witness duty, not to show my wit, Duty so great, which wit so poor as mine May make seem bare, in wanting words to show it.”

And there is much in the Sonnets which can be made to coincide with what we know of Southampton. But, as we push inquiry, difficulties of all kinds begin to swarm in on us. The first is, as in the case of Pembroke, with the dedication. To say nothing of the fact that “W. H.” is not “H. W.”--the possibility of the appellation of “Mr.” being applied to one who had been an Earl since 1581, and who had twice been addressed in dedications by his full titles, and that by Shakespeare himself, is a wholly inadmissible hypothesis. To argue that this was merely “a blind,” is simply to beg the question. If the Sonnets were addressed to Southampton, they must have been written between 1593 and 1598. In 1593 Southampton was in his twenty-first year, in 1598 in his twenty-sixth; Shakespeare, respectively, in his thirty-first and thirty-fifth year. Now, what is especially emphasized in the sonnets is the youthfulness of the young man to whom they are dedicated, and the advanced age of the poet. In Sonnet cviii. the youth is addressed as “a sweet boy,” in cxxvi. as “a lovely boy,” in liv. as “a beauteous and lovely youth”; in xcv. his “budding name” is referred to, while the poet speaks of himself as “old,” as “beaten and chopped with tanned antiquity,” as being “with Time’s injurious hand crushed and o’erworn.” And so, as has been more than once pointed out, we have this anomaly--a man of thirty-four describing himself as a thing of “tanned antiquity” in writing to “a sweet and lovely boy” of twenty-five. No one could have been less like the effeminate youth of the Sonnets than Southampton. All we know about him, including his portraits, indicates that he was eminently masculine and manly. Again, it is matter of history that he greatly distinguished himself on the Azores expedition in 1597, acquitting himself with so much gallantry that, during the voyage, he was knighted by Essex. To this expedition, which must have involved one of those absences of which we hear so much in the Sonnets, to this exploit and this honour, which afforded so much opportunity for peculiarly acceptable compliment, Shakespeare makes no reference at all. There is nothing to indicate that the youth of the Sonnets had gained any military or political distinction, had taken any part in public life, or had ever been absent from England. To assume with Mr. Lee that the Sonnets were written in or before 1594, and therefore before Southampton had become distinguished, is to involve ourselves in inextricable difficulties. Even Mr. Lee admits that Sonnet cvii. must have reference to the death of Elizabeth in 1603. With regard to the supposed references to Southampton’s relations with Elizabeth Vernon, no certain, or, to speak more accurately, no even plausible inferences can be drawn in any particular: all that they can be reduced to are degrees of improbability.

If, again, we accept the theory of Tyrwhitt and Malone, supported by Mr. Butler, and suppose that W. H. was some obscure person, we are proceeding on mere hypothesis, and a hypothesis seriously shaken by the plain meaning expressed in Sonnets xxxvi., xxxvii., and cxxiv.

The enigma of these Sonnets is, we repeat, as insoluble now as it was when inquiry was first directed to them. Whether they are to be regarded as autobiographical, as dramatic studies, as a mixture of both, as a collection of miscellaneous poems, as written to order for others, as mere exercises in the sonnet-cycle, or as all of these things, is alike uncertain. Our knowledge of the time of their composition begins and ends with the facts, that some of them were, presumably, in circulation in or before 1598, that two of them had certainly been composed in or before 1599, and that all of them had been written by 1609. The rest is mere conjecture; and on mere conjecture and mere hypothesis is based every attempt to solve their mystery. If certainty about them can ever be arrived at, it can only be attained by evidence of which, as yet, we have not even an inkling. The probability is, that it was Shakespeare’s intention, or rather Thorpe’s intention, to baffle curiosity, and, except in the judgment of fanatics, he has certainly succeeded in doing so.

For our own part we are very much inclined to suspect, that they owed their origin to the fashion of composing sonnet-cycles, that those cycles suggested their themes and gave them the ply; that the beautiful youth, the rival poet, and the dark lady are pure fictions of the imagination; and that these poems are autobiographical only in the sense in which _Venus and Adonis_, the _Rape of Lucrece_, _Romeo and Juliet_ and _Othello_ are autobiographical.

LANDSCAPE IN POETRY[31]

[Footnote 31: _Landscape in Poetry from Homer to Tennyson._ By Francis T. Palgrave.]

It would be scarcely possible for a critic of Mr. Palgrave’s taste and learning to produce a treatise on any aspect of poetry, which would not be full of interest and instruction, and the present volume is a contribution, and in some respects a memorable contribution, to a particularly attractive subject of critical inquiry. Its purpose is to trace the history of descriptive poetry in its relation, that is to say, to natural objects and more particularly to landscape, by illustrating its characteristics at different periods, and among different nations. Beginning with the Homeric poems, Mr. Palgrave reviews successively the “landscape” of the Greeks, the Romans, the Hebrews, the mediæval Italians, the Celts, the Anglo-Saxons, and of our own poets, from the predecessors of Chaucer to Lord Tennyson. That a work, covering an area so immense, should be far less satisfactory in some portions than in others is no more than what might be expected, and Mr. Palgrave would probably be himself the first to admit that, except when he is dealing with the classical poetry of Hellas, of ancient and mediæval Italy, and of our own country, his treatise has no pretension to adequacy. Even within these bounds there is much which is irrelevant, and much which is surprisingly defective. Where, as in a subject like this, the material at the author’s disposal is necessarily so superabundant, surely the utmost care should have been taken both to keep within the limits of the theme proposed, and to select the most pertinent and typical illustrations. But when Mr. Palgrave illustrates “Homeric landscape” by the simile describing the heifers frisking about the drove of cows in the fold-yard, and the “Sophoclean landscape” by the simile of the blast-impelled wave rolling up the shingle, he lays himself open to the imputation of drawing at random on his commonplace book. Indeed, the pleasure with which lovers of classical poetry will read this book cannot fail to be mingled with the liveliest surprise and disappointment. Take the Homeric poems. If a reader, tolerably well versed in the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, were asked for illustrations of the power with which natural phenomena are described, to what would he turn? Certainly not to Mr. Palgrave’s meagre and trivial examples, three of which alone have any title to pertinence. He would turn to the winter landscape in _Iliad_, xii. 278-286, to the lifting of the cloud from the landscape in _Iliad_, xvi. 296:--

ὡς δ’ ὁτ’ αφ’ ὑψηλης κορυφης ορεος μεγαλοιο κινηση πυκινην νεφελην στεροπηγερετα Ζευς, εκ τ’ εφανεν πασαι σκοπιαι και πρωονες ακροι και ναπαι, ουρανοθεν δ’ αρ’ ὑπερῥαγη ασπετος αιθηρ.

“As when Zeus, the gatherer of the lightning, moves a thick cloud from the high head of some mighty mountain, and all the cliffs and the jutting crags and the dells start into light, and the immeasurable heaven breaks open to its highest”;

to the descent of the wind on the sea, _Ib._ xi. 305-308:--

ὡς ὁποτε Ζεφυρος νεφεα στυφελιξη αργεσταο Νοτοιο, βαθειη λαιλαπι τυπτων; πολλον δε τροφι κυμα κυλινδεται, ὑψοσε δ’ αχνη σκιδναται εξ ανεμοιο πολυπλαγκτοιο ιωης.

“As when the west wind buffets the cloudlets of the brightening south wind, lashing them with furious squall, and the big wave swells up and rolls along, and the spray is scattered on high by the blast of the careering gale”;

or to the pictures of the billow-buffeted headland, and the wave bursting on the ship in _Iliad_, xv. 618-628; or to the storm-cloud coming over the sea in _Iliad_, iv. 277; or to the descent of the wind on the standing corn, _Iliad_, ii. 147. He would point, above all, to the description of Calypso’s grotto, in _Odyssey_, v. 63-74; to that of the harbour of Phorcys, in _Odyssey_, xiii. 97-112; to the fountain in the grove, xvii. 205-211. Mr. Palgrave comments justly on Homer’s minute observation of nature; but he only gives one illustration, where it is noticed in _Odyssey_, vi. 94, that the sea, in beating on the coast, “washed the pebbles clean.” He might have added with propriety many others: as the “earth blackening behind the plough,” in _Iliad_, xviii. 548; the bats in the cave, _Odyssey_, xxiv. 5-8; the birds escaping from the vultures, _Iliad_, xxii. 304, 305; the wasps “wriggling as far as the middle,” σφηκες μεσον αιολοι, _Iliad_, xii. 167; the dogs and the lions, _Iliad_, xviii. 585, 586.

Mr. Palgrave observes that Homer “was not only familiar with the sea, but loved it with a love somewhat unusual in poets.” We venture to submit that there is not a line in Homer indicating that he “loved” the sea, except for poetical purposes; like most of the Greeks he probably dreaded it; his real feeling towards it is no doubt indicated in his own words:--

ου γαρ εγω γε τι φημι κακωτερον αλλο θαλασσης ανδρα γε συγχευαι.

--nothing crushes a man’s spirit more than the sea. Mr. Palgrave justly points out that Hesiod’s rude prosaic style and matter are not congenial to the poetic landscape, yet it is only fair to Hesiod to say, that his poetry is not without vivid touches of natural description, as the winter scene in _Works and Days_, 504 sqq., and his description of the beginning of spring, 565-569, show. Professor Palgrave next glances at the treatment of nature in the lyric poets, and very properly cites the lovely fragment of Alcman:

βαλε δη βαλε κηρυλος ειην ὁς τ’ επι κυματος ανθος ἁμ’ αλκυονεσσι ποτηται, νηλεγες ητορ εχων, ἁλιπορφυρος ειαρος ορνις,--

but in translating it makes a truly extraordinary blunder.

“Would I were the kingfisher, as he flies, with his mates _in his feeble age_, between wind and water.”

νηλεγες ητορ meaning, as we need hardly say, “reckless heart”; it is exactly Byron’s, “With all her _reckless_ birds upon the wing.” In the quotations from Sappho, Ibycus, and Pindar, Mr. Palgrave has been judicious and happy, but surely he ought to have found place for the lovely flower cradle of Iamus in the sixth Olympic Ode, and for the moonlight evening in the third Olympian,--only seven words, but what a picture!--while, in the popular poetry, the omission of the Swallow Song is inexplicable.[32] Nor can we forgive him the omission of the magnificent simile of the spring wind clearing away the clouds, in the thirteenth of the fragments attributed to Solon.

But it is in dealing with the Greek dramatists that Mr. Palgrave is most defective in illustration. It is not to the opening of the _Prometheus_, or to the conclusion, or, indeed, to any of the passages from this poet which Mr. Palgrave cites, that we must turn for Æschylean landscape, or for illustration of this poet’s power of natural description. It is to his brief picture--his pictures of scenery, though singularly vivid, are always brief--of the airy seat “against which the watery clouds drift into snow,”

λισσας αιγιλιψ απροσδεικτος οιοφρων κρεμας γυπιας πετρα (_Supplices_, 772-3),

where almost every word is a perfect picture, literally beggaring mere translation; it is to his description, so magical in its rhythm, of the mid-day sea slumbering in summer calm (_Agamemnon_, 548-50),

η θαλπος, ευτε ποντος εν μεσημβριναις κοιταις ακυμων νηνεμοις ευδοι πεσων,

to his picture of the keen brisk wind, clearing the clouds away, to bring into relief against the sky the dark masses of waves tossing on the horizon (_Agamemnon_, 1152-54), to his world-famous

ποντιων κυματων ανηριθμον γελασμα.

“The multitudinous laughter of the ocean waves.”

--_Prometheus_, 89-90.