Illustrations are still drawn from sport: 'Look, as the full fed hound or gorged hawk There are, as ever, conceits : "Without the bed her other fair hand was, and there are, as I have said, tirades of an astonishing rhetorical force, passages which, recited by an English Rachel, would still bring down the house. As the denunciations of Night : 'Blind muffled bawd! dark harbour of defame! of Opportunity: 'Thy secret pleasure turns to open shame, Thy sugard tongue to bitter wormwood tast: : and of Time : 'Eater of youth, false slave to false delight, Base watch of woes, sin's pack-horse, vertue's snare whose glory it is : 'To ruinate proud buildings with thy hours And smear with dust their glitt'ring golden towers . The form of these tirades is repeated from the Venus, but their music is louder, and is developed into a greater variety of keys, sometimes into the piercing minors of the more metaphysical Sonnets: 'Why work'st thou mischief in thy pilgrimage? One poor retiring minute in an age Would purchase thee a thousand thousand friends. Thou ceaseless lackey to eternity!' This last apostrophe is great; but that in Lucrece there should be so many of the same tremendous type, which have escaped the fate of hackneyed quotation, is one of the most elusive factors in a difficult problem: 'Pure thoughts are dead and still Soft pity enters at an iron gate. Unruly blasts wait on the tender spring, Unwholesome weeds take root with precious flowers, What virtue breeds, iniquity devours.' These, for all their strength and sweetness, might conceivably have been written by some other of the greater poets. But these: 'And dying eyes gleam'd forth their ashy lights. 'Tis but a part of sorrow that we hear : Deep sounds make lesser noise than shallow fords, O! that is gone for which I sought to live, And therefore now I need not fear to die. For Sorrow, like a heavy hanging bell, Once set on ringing with his own weight goes': these, I say, could have been written by Shakespeare only. They may rank with the few which Arnold chose for standards from the poetry of all ages; yet by a caprice of literary criticism they are never quoted, and are scarce so much as known. XIV The fate of Shakespeare's Sonnets has been widely different from the fate of his Narrative Poems. The Venus and the Lucrece were popular at once, and ran through many editions: the Sonnets, published in 1609, were not reprinted until 1640, and were then so effectually disguised by an arbitrary process of interpolation, omission, re-arrangement, and misleading description as to excite but little attention, until in 1780 Malone opened a new era of research into their bearing on the life and character of Shakespeare. Since then the tables have been turned. For while the Venus and the Lucrece have been largely neglected, so many volumes, in support of theories so variously opposed, have been written on this aspect of the Sonnets, that it has become impossible even to sum up the contention except by adding yet another volume to already overladen shelves. The controversy has its own interest; but that interest, I submit, is alien from, and even antagonistic to, an appreciation of lyrical excellence. I do not mean that the Sonnets are 'mere exercises' written to 'rival' or to 'parody' the efforts of other poets. Such curiosities of criticism are born of a nervous revulsion from conclusions reached by the more confident champions of a 'personal theory'; and their very eccentricity measures the amount of damage done, not by those who endeavour, laudably enough, to retrieve a great lost life but, by those who allow such attempts at biography to bias their consideration of poems which we possess intact. If, indeed, we must choose between critics, who discover an autobiography in the Sonnets, and critics, who find in them a train of poetic exhalations whose airy iridescence never reflects the passionate colours of this earth, then the first are preferable. At least their theory makes certain additions which, though dubious and defective, are still additions to our guesses at Shakespeare the man; whereas the second subtracts from a known masterpiece its necessary material of experience and emotion. But we need not choose the middle way remains of accepting from the Sonnets only the matter which they embody and the form which they display. : Taking them up, then, as you would take up the Lucrece or another example of Shakespeare's earlier work, there is nothing to note in their metrical form but the perfection of treatment by which Shakespeare has stamped it for his own. They were immediately preceded by many sonnet-sequences: by so many, indeed, that Shakespeare could hardly have taken his place at the head of his lyrical contemporaries without proving that he, too, could write sonnets with the best of them. Sidney's Astrophel and Stella (written 1581-84) had been published in 1591-(when Tom Nash was constrained to bid some other 'Poets and' Rimers to put out their 'rush candles,' and bequeath their 'crazed quaterzayns' to the chandlers -for 'loe, here hee cometh that hath broek your legs')with the sonnets of 'sundry other noblemen and gentlemen' appended, among them twenty-eight by S(amuel) D(aniel), nineteen of which were afterwards reprinted in his Delia; the next year H(enry) C(onstable) published twenty, afterwards reprinted in his Diana; in 1593 B. Barnes published Parthenophil and Parthenope, containing a hundred and four (besides madrigals, odes, and eclogues); and in 1594 W. Percy, to whom this gathering had been dedicated, riposted in twenty, 'to the fairest Calia,' which touch the nadir of incompetence. But in the same memorable year three other sequences appeared, whose excellence and fame rendered an attempt in her of by w 'My mistress' snow-white skin doth much excell The pure soft wool Arcadian sheep do bear' : I name will show what inept fatuity co-existed with the highest flights of Elizabethan verse; and because the third number in Fidessa 2 was reprinted by Jaggard in the Passionate Pilgrim (1599), together with other pieces stolen from Shakespeare and Barnefield. The publication of such a medley attests the wellknown fact that Elizabethan sonnets were handed about in мs. for years among poetical cliques, and, as W. Percy complains, were committed to the Press' without the authors' knowledge, although 'concealed as things privy' to himself. It is also worth noting that the Elizabethans I have named, who signed their sonnet-sequences sometimes only with initials, often transfigured them by additions, omissions, and rearrangings prior to republication; and this was especially the practice of Daniel and Drayton, whose sonnets, it so happens, offer the closest points of comparison to Shakespeare's. That two of Shakespeare's should have been published with the work of others in 1599, and afterwards, with slight variations, 1 Nineteen of which had appeared, cf. supra. * Griffin was almost certainly one of Shakespeare's connexions by marriage. See 'Shakespeare's Ancestry,' The Times, Oct. 14, 1895. * W. Percy to the Reader. h |