VIII SHAKSPERE'S SONNETS [In 1598, Meres, praising Shakspere, mentioned "his sugred Sonnets among his private friends." In the Passionate Pilgrim, ascribed to Shakspere though probably in large part spurious, and published in 1599, appeared Sonnets 138 and 144, and "When my love swears that she is made of truth," etc., "Two loves I have of comfort and despair," etc. On May 20th, 1609, "a Booke calles SHAKESPEARES sonnettes" was entered in the Stationers' Register. In 1609, "Shake-Speares Sonnets. Never before Imprinted" were published, substantially as we have them. The book was dedicated by Thomas Thorpe, the publisher, "To the onlie begetter of these insuing sonnets, Mr. W. H.” What the term "begetter" means, and who " Mr. W. H." was, have never been quite settled. Concerning the dates of the sonnets we can assert only that some of them were probably in existence before 1598, that two of the second series were certainly in existence, substantially as we have them, in 1599, and that all were finished by 1609. In what order they were actually written we have no means of determining. For our purposes, however, we are justified in assuming that, as a whole, the sonnets include work probably done before Henry IV., and also work done during the period covered by the next chapter.] DURING the last century or so, a considerable literature of comment and interpretation has gathered about the Sonnets. Some of this is instructive, some 1 Conveniently summarized by Tyler: Shakespeare's Sonnets; London, 1890, pp. 145–149. suggestive; much is ingeniously absurd. In general, however, all this criticism alike deals chiefly with the question of whether the Sonnets are authentic statements of autobiographic fact, or literary exercises, or perhaps rather allegorical fantasies. A similar unanswerable question exists concerning the first great series of Elizabethan sonnets, Sidney's Astrophel and Stella. About the two other best-known series, there is less doubt: Spenser's Amoretti are almost certainly authentic addresses to the lady who became his wife; while Drayton's sonnets to Idea are probably mere rhetorical exercises. If to these names we add that of Daniel, who wrote somewhat analogous verses to one Delia, we have completed the list of familiar series of Elizabethan sonnets, as distinguished from stray, independent ones. The names of Sidney, Spenser, Drayton, and Daniel, with whom we here group Shakspere, instantly define one fact about the Sonnets which marks them apart from most of Shakspere's work. Sidney and Spenser never wrote for the actual stage; and, though Drayton seems to have collaborated in a number of plays, and Daniel to have written one or two, both Drayton and Daniel are generally remembered not as dramatists but as poets, the body of whose purely literary work remains considerable. In other words, we group Shakspere now with the masters not of popular, but of polite literature. The Sonnets, like almost all the extant work of these other poets, were addressed not to the general taste of their time, but to the most sensitively critical. Whatever else, they are painstaking, conscientious works of art. Throughout them, too, appears a mood perhaps most fully expressed in Sonnet 81: "Or I shall live your epitaph to make, Or you survive when I in earth am rotten; The writer of these sonnets, in short, avows his belief that they shall be lasting literature. Not an infallible sign of serious artistic purpose, this is at least a frequent. It appears in Spenser's Amoretti, and in many passages of Chapman and of Ben Jonson, like that superb boast about poetry in the Poetaster:— "She can so mould Rome and her monuments Within the liquid marble of her lines, That they shall live, fresh and miraculous, In small men pathetically comic, such confidence becomes in great men nobly admirable. Of Shakspere's Sonnets, then, we may fairly assert that they must have seemed to the writer more important and valuable than his plays. Such being the case, whoever attempts to define an impression of Shakspere's individuality must take special interest in these most conscientiously artistic of his works. If one could make sure of what they mean, one might confidently feel intimate knowledge of their author. Such confidence, though, has betrayed too many honest critics into absurdity, to prove, nowadays, however tempting, a serious danger. The only impregnable answer to the question of what the Sonnets signify is the one lately made by some German writer: "Ignoramus, ignorabimus" ("We do not know, and we never shall"). Keeping carefully in mind, however, the necessary uncertainty of any conclusion, we may fairly incline to one or another of the unproved, unprovable conjectures as to what the Sonnets actually mean. The conjecture of Mr. Thomas Tyler, while by no means impregnable, seems perhaps the most plausible.1 In brief, he believes that the first series of the Sonnets from 1 to 126 were addressed to William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, a very fascinating and somewhat erratic young nobleman, whose age fits the known dates; and that the second series - from 127 to 152-were addressed to a certain Mrs. Mary Fitton, at one time a 1 T. Tyler: Shakespeare's Sonnets: London; David Nutt: 1890. Mr. Fleay puts no faith in this Tyler story; and sets forth many reasons for believing the Sonnets to have been addressed to Southampton; Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama: 208-232. maid of honor to Queen Elizabeth, and demonstrably a person of considerable fascination and of loose morals. Shakspere, it is assumed, became her lover; and Pembroke, by whom she certainly had a child, is assumed to have taken her from him. The improbability that a woman of her rank should have had to do with theatrical people is met by the fact that in 1600 Will Kempe, the clown of Shakspere's company, dedicated a book to this very lady. The probability that Mrs. Fitton was the woman in question was curiously strengthened by the fact, discovered after Tyler's work was written, that a colored effigy on her family monument shows her to have been of very dark complexion. And so on. The tale is plausible; after all, however, it is only a tissue of past gossip and modern conjecture. The most one can say of it is this: The first series of Sonnets expresses a noble fascination; the second, a base one, of which the baseness grows with contemplation. The former is certainly in harmony with what is known of Pembroke, the latter with what is known of Mary Fitton. Had Shakspere actually undergone such an experience of folly and shame as Tyler conjectures, these poems would fitly express it. Off-hand, of course, one would declare the very frankness of self-revelation thus suggested to be incredible. Sensitiveness, one would say, is essentially reticent; and whoever wrote the Sonnets proved thereby the possession of rare sensitiveness. A little consideration, however, proves this objection mistaken. |