William Shakspeare. wrote as never man wrote; while, so far as is known, he never once disavowed the authorship during the seven years which intervened between their surreptitious publication with his name, and his death in 1616. It is when we come to contemplate the feelings and the passions forming the substance of the poems, with the strange, sad, equivocal story told there, and venture on the identification of the person or persons whom the poet addresses or feigns to address, that the grand difficulty confronts us. 'SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS. Never before Imprinted,' were published in a small-quarto volume in 1609 by Thomas Thorpe, a bookseller of some note. Prefixed was the following dedication (reduced from the original edition), the enigmatical character of which has occasioned much learned embarrassment, and seems not even yet to have quite lost its power of setting critics by the ears: TO.THE.ONLIE.BEGETTER.OF. THESE. INSVING.SONNETS. PROMISED. BY. OVR. EVER-LIVING.POET. WISHETH. THE WELL-WISHING. ADVENTVRER. IN. SETTING. FORTH. T. T. It were idle to describe the various cuts which have been made at this Gordian knot. Suffice it to say that the initials 'T. T.' have always been understood to be those of the publisher, Thomas Thorpe, and that authorities are now pretty well agreed on the more crucial' Mr. W. H.' as veiling the family name of the Earl of Pembroke-William Herbert;1 the inscription reading thus: Thomas Thorpe, the well-wishing adven This important identification was made by B. Heywood Bright in or about 1819, but first publicly announced by James Boaden in The Gentleman's Magazine, Oct. 1832, on independent discovery. See Boaden's work On the Sonnets of Shakespeare (1837). 2 turer, in setting forth, wisheth to Mr. W. H., the only begetter of these insuing Sonnets, all happiness and that eternity promised by our everliving poet. There does not seem to be so insuperable a difficulty in the expression 'onlie begetter' as the quantity of ink which has been shed over it would bespeak. It can bear but two meanings. If, on the one hand, it means that Herbert was the sole procurer of the Sonnets for the piratical Thorpe, it is simply a statement of fact on the best authority, which, even if it were not entirely credible, we should be bound to accept. Moreover, it furnishes the only clue we possess as to how the poems ever found their way out of that 'private' circle within which we learn on Meres's testimony they were known prior to 1598, and beyond which Shakspeare doubtless never intended them to go. If, on the other, we are to take begetter' in its ordinary and more obvious sense of the person to whom the poems owed their existence, the solution is equally simple. In all likelihood Thorpe was not ignorant of the part played by Herbert in the secret drama of the Sonnets, and itched to blab it. True his 'onlie' exaggerates that part, whatever its real extent may have been ; but it seems ridiculous to stickle for verbal precision where the writer had so obvious a motive for exaggeration. 'Onlie' was but a bit of flattering homage on the part of the grateful pirate to his noble procurer. 'The onlie begetter'!-Thorpe's expression implies both senses-procurer and originator-and was no doubt chosen for that reason. Turning to the more important question of the groundwork or subjectmatter of the Sonnets, it will be obvious to those who have any idea of its dimensions that it cannot be discussed within the limits of an Anthology. The reader must pursue it for himself in the elaborate and exhaustive works devoted to the subject, especially those of Mr. Charles Armitage Brown3 and Mr. Gerald Massey, the protagonists of the two great opposite theories of the Sonnets, as, according to the former, Autobiographic or Personal, and, according to the latter, Dramatic (vicarious) or Impersonal. Whichever of these works may ultimately determine his faith-and I cannot doubt that it will be Mr. Massey's masterly and 1 On the particular use of the word 'adventurer' about this time, in relation to its occurrence in the inscription, consult Dr. Grosart's Essay prefixed to his edition of Donne's Poems (i, 1873, pp. xlv-xlvii). 2 Francis Meres (Palladis Tamia. Wits Treasury, &c., 1598, f. 281-2): As the soule of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras: so the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous & hony-tongued Shakespeare, witnes his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among his private friends, &c.' Shakespeare's Autobiographical Poems. Being his Sonnets clearly developed: with his Character drawn chiefly from his works. 1838. Shakspeare's Sonnets never before interpreted, &c., 1866; and a second edition, The Secret Drama of Shakspeare's Sonnets Unfolded, with the Characters Identified, 1872, containing a valuable Supplementary Chapter. The most noteworthy among recent contributions to this literature are the papers of Mr. F. G. Fleay ('On the Motive of Shakspere's Sonnets,' 1-125: Macmillan's Magazine, March, 1875), and Mr. T. A. Spalding (Gentleman's Magazine, March, 1878). 1 William Shakspeare. luminous exposition-there is one grand principle, insufficiently recognised in either, which the reader embarking on this vast and perilous inquiry will do well to keep steadfastly before him. It was well put by the late Robert Bell in an introduction to the Sonnets: All poetry is autobiographical. But the particle of actual life out of which verse is wrought may be, and almost always is, wholly incommensurate to the emotion depicted, and remote from the forms into which it is ultimately shaped. We should remember, also, that poets draw upon two sources-experience and observation; and who shall undertake to separate the realities from the creations?' Mr. Bell said an equally true thing some ten years later when he said of the Shakspeare theories generally, that they help materially to spoil our enjoyment of him.' That the poems themselves, and not the excogitations of theorists on them, are his primary and proper concern, is a score on which the reader need have no misgivings. An earnest study of any portion of them will teach him more of the mind and heart of Shakspeare and bear him further into the poet's inmost soul than all the brain-spun systems that ever were written. So Shelley seems to have been taught, if, entertaining a recent happy suggestion,3 we take that most exquisite fragment of his to have been evoked by the Sonnets : 'I am as a spirit who has dwelt Within his heart of hearts; and I have felt His feelings, and have thought his thoughts, and known Unheard but in the silence of his blood, Image the trembling calm of summer seas. I have unlocked the golden melodies Of his deep soul, as with a master-key, And loosened them, and bathed myself therein— Clothing his wings with lightning.' The following are a few of the more noteworthy opinions which have been recorded of Shakspeare's Sonnets. "There is extant a small Volume of miscellaneous Poems in which Shakespeare expresses his own feelings in his own Person. It is not difficult to conceive that the Editor, George Steevens, should have been insensible to the beauties of one portion of that Volume, the Sonnets; though there is not a part of the writings of 1 The Poems of William Shakspeare. Edited by Robert Bell. 1855, p. 152. 4 Mr. Garnett's Relics of Shelley, 1862, p. 81. Steevens's Advertisement to the 1793 edition of the Plays, vol. i, p. vii: 'We have not reprinted the Sonnets, &c., of Shakspeare, because the strongest act of Parliament this Poet where is found in an equal compass a greater number of exquisite feelings felicitously expressed.'-Wordsworth.' 'These Sonnets, like the Venus and Adonis, and the Rape of Lucrece, are characterized by boundless fertility and laboured condensation of thought, with perfection of sweetness in rhythm and metre.'-Coleridge.2 'The transcendent beauty of Shakespeare's Sonnets is now universally felt and acknowledged; and the insolent contempt with which Steevens presumed to speak of them, is only remembered to the injury of the critic's reputation. They contain such a quantity of profound thought as must astonish every reflecting reader; they are adorned by splendid and delicate imagery; they are sublime, pathetic, tender, or sweetly playful; while they delight the ear by their fluency, and their varied harmonies of rhythm. Amid so much excellence, their occasional conceits and quaintness are forgotten.'—Dyce. 3 'There is nothing more remarkable or fascinating in English poetry. ... We read them again and again, and find each time some new proof of his almost superhuman insight into human nature; of his unrivalled mastery over all the tones of love. We cannot bring ourselves to wish that "Shakspeare had never written them," or that the world should have wanted perhaps the most powerful and certainly the most singular, utterances of passion which Poetry has yet supplied.'—F. T. Palgrave. 5 'Shakespeare's Sonnets are so heavily laden with meaning, so doubleshotted, if one may so speak, with thought, so penetrated and pervaded with a repressed passion, that, packed as all this is into narrowest limits, it sometimes imparts no little obscurity to them; and they often require to be heard or read not once but many times, in fact to be studied, before they reveal to us all the treasures of thought and feeling which they contain.'-Dr. Trench." I conclude these introductory remarks with a word-portrait of Shakspeare by Ben Jonson which is much less generally known than it deserves to be. Mr. Massey quoting it in his later work on the Sonnets, observes: 'If it had not been for the persistent endeavour to prove Shakspeare a lawyer, and too confidently assumed that the character, or rather the name, of "Ovid," in the Poetaster (produced at Shak that could be framed, would fail to compel readers into their service.' Steevens had reproduced the Sonnets with commendable accuracy seven-and-twenty years before (Twenty of the Plays of Shakespeare, &c., 4 vols., 1766). Essay, Supplementary to the Preface. Wordsworth's Poems, 1815, i, 352. Notwithstanding the frequent beauties of these Sonnets . . it is impossible to wish that Shakspeare had never written them.'-Hallam's Literature of Europe, iii, 264. 5 Songs and Sonnets by William Shakespeare. Edited by Francis Turner Palgrave, 1865, p. 243. A Household Book of English Poetry, 2nd ed., 1870, p. 395 (earlier, The History of the English Sonnet: Dublin Afternoon Lectures, [1866], iv, 144). William Shakspeare. speare's theatre, 1601), was intended for Shakspeare, it would have been seen that it is in the character of "Virgil" that Jonson has rendered the nature of the man, the quality of his learning, the affluence of his poetry, the height at which the poet himself stood above his work, in the truest, best likeness of Shakspeare extant.' The interlocutors are Cæsar, Horace, Gallus, and Tibullus. Note that 'Horace' represents Ben himself, and is singled out by Cæsar for his opinion as being 'the poorest, and likelyest to envie, or to detract' (Poëtaster, Or his Arraignement, Act v, sc. i: Workes, folio, 1616, p. 332) :— CÆSAR. Say then, lov'd Horace, thy true thought of Virgil. HORACE. I judge him of a rectified spirit, By many revolutions of discourse (In his bright reasons influence) refin'd From all the tartarous moodes of common men; Bearing the nature and similitude Of a right heavenly bodie: most severe In fashion and collection of himselfe, And then as cleare and confident as Jove. GALLUS. And yet so chaste and tender is his eare That he thinkes may become the honour'd name That all the lasting fruits of his full merit In his owne Poemes he doth still distaste: As if his mindes peece, which he strove to paint, TIBULLUS. But, to approve his workes of soveraigne worth, CÆSAR. You meane, he might repeat part of his workes, True, royall Cæsar. TIBULLUS. CÆSAR. Worthily observ'd: And a most worthie vertue in his workes. What thinks materiall Horace of his learning? |