Chapter 20

[53]Cf. Fleay,Life, pp. 188 seq.

[55a]The story, which has been traced back to the Greek romanceAnthia and Abrocomasby Xenophon Ephesius, a writer of the second century, seems to have been first told in modern Europe about 1470 by Masuccio in hisNovellino(No. xxxiii.: cf. Mr. Waters’s translation, ii. 155-65). It was adapted from Masuccio by Luigi da Porto in his novel,La Giulietta, 1535, and by Bandello in hisNovelle, 1554, pt. ii., No. ix. Bandello’s version became classical; it was translated in theHistoires Tragiquesof Françoisde Belleforest (Paris, 1559) by Pierre Boaistuau de Launay, an occasional collaborator with Belleforest. At the same time as Shakespeare was writingRomeo and Juliet, Lope de Vega was dramatising the tale in his Spanish play calledCastelvines y Monteses(i.e.Capulets and Montagus). For an analysis of Lope’s play, which ends happily, seeVariorum Shakespeare, 1821, xxi. 451-60.

[55b]Cf.Originals and Analogues, pt. i. ed. P. A. Daniel, New Shakspere Society.

[56]Cf.Parallel Texts, ed. P. A. Daniel, New Shakspere Society; Fleay,Life, pp. 191 seq.

[60]Cf. Fleay,Life, pp. 235 seq.;Trans. New Shakspere Soc., 1876, pt. ii. by Miss Jane Lee; Swinburne,Study, pp. 51 seq.

[62]In later life Shakespeare, inHamlet, borrows from Lyly’sEuphuesPolonius’s advice to Laertes; but, however he may have regarded the moral sentiment of that didactic romance, he had no respect for the affectations of its prose style, which he ridiculed in a familiar passage in IHenry IV, II. iv. 445: ‘For though the camomile, the more it is trodden on, the faster it grows, yet youth the more it is wasted, the sooner it wears.’

[65]Henslowe, p. 24.

[66a]Cf. Cohn,Shakespeare in Germany, pp. 155 et seq.

[66b]Arber, ii. 644.

[66c]Cf. W. G. Waters’s translation ofIl Pecorone, pp. 44-60 (fourth day, novel 1). The collection was not published till 1558, and the story followed by Shakespeare was not accessible in his day in any language but the original Italian.

[68]Lopez was the Earl of Leicester’s physician before 1586, and the Queen’s chief physician from that date. An accomplished linguist, with friends in all parts of Europe, he acted in 1590, at the request of the Earl of Essex, as interpreter to Antonio Perez, a victim of Philip II’s persecution, whom Essex and his associates brought to England in order to stimulate the hostility of the English public to Spain. Don Antonio (as the refugee was popularly called) proved querulous and exacting. A quarrel between Lopez and Essex followed. Spanish agents in London offered Lopez a bribe to poison Antonio and the Queen. The evidence that he assented to the murderous proposal is incomplete, but he was convicted of treason, and, although the Queen long delayed signing his death-warrant, he was hanged at Tyburn on June 7, 1594. His trial and execution evoked a marked display of anti-Semitism on the part of the London populace. Very few Jews were domiciled in England at the time. That a Christian named Antonio should be the cause of the ruin alike of the greatest Jew in Elizabethan England and of the greatest Jew of the Elizabethan drama is a curious confirmation of the theory that Lopez was the begetter of Shylock. Cf. the article on Roderigo Lopez in theDictionary of National Biography; ‘The Original of Shylock,’ by the present writer, inGent. Mag.February 1880; Dr. H. Graetz,Shylock in den Sagen,in den Dramen and in der Geschichte, Krotoschin, 1880;New Shakspere Soc. Trans.1887-92, pt. ii. pp. 158-92; ‘The Conspiracy of Dr. Lopez,’ by the Rev. Arthur Dimock, inEnglish Historical Review(1894), ix. 440 seq.

[70]Gesta Grayorum, printed in 1688 from a contemporary manuscript. A second performance of theComedy of Errorswas given at Gray’s Inn Hall by the Elizabethan Stage Society on Dec. 6, 1895.

[72a]Cf. Swinburne,Study of Shakspere, pp. 231-74.

[72b]See p. 89.

[73]Cf. Dodsley’sOld Plays, ed. W. C. Hazlitt, 1874, vii. 236-8.

[74]See Appendix, sections iii. and iv.

[75a]See Ovid’sAmores, liber i. elegy xv. ll. 35-6. Ovid’sAmores, or Elegies of Love, were translated by Marlowe about 1589, and were first printed without a date on the title-page, probably about 1597. Marlowe’s version had probably been accessible in manuscript in the eight years’ interval. Marlowe rendered the lines quoted by Shakespeare thus:

Let base conceited wits admire vile things,Fair Phœbus lead me to the Muses’ springs!

[75b]Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and Lodge’s Scillaes Metamorphosis, by James P. Reardon, in ‘Shakespeare Society’s Papers,’ iii. 143-6. Cf. Lodge’s description of Venus’s discovery of the wounded Adonis:

Her daintie hand addrest to dawe her deere,Her roseall lip alied to his pale cheeke,Her sighs and then her lookes and heavie cheere,Her bitter threates, and then her passions meeke;How on his senseles corpse she lay a-crying,As if the boy were then but new a-dying.

In the minute description in Shakespeare’s poem of the chase of the hare (ll. 673-708) there are curious resemblances to theOde de la Chasse(on a stag hunt) by the French dramatist, Estienne Jodelle, in hisŒuvres et Meslanges Poétiques, 1574.

[77a]Rosamond, in Daniel’s poem, muses thus when King Henry challenges her honour:

But what? he is my King and may constraine me;Whether I yeeld or not, I live defamed.The World will thinke Authoritie did gaine me,I shall be judg’d his Love and so be shamed;We see the faire condemn’d that never gamed,And if I yeeld, ’tis honourable shame.If not, I live disgrac’d, yet thought the same.

[77b]Watson makes this comment on his poem or passion on Time, (No. lxxvii.): ‘The chiefe contentes of this Passion are taken out of Seraphine [i.e.Serafino], Sonnet 132:

Col tempo passa[n] gli anni, i mesi, e l’hore,Col tempo le richeze, imperio, e regno,Col tempo fama, honor, fortezza, e ingegno,Col tempo giouentù, con beltà more, &c.’

Watson adds that he has inverted Serafino’s order for ‘rimes sake,’ or ‘upon some other more allowable consideration.’ Shakespeare was also doubtless acquainted with Giles Fletcher’s similar handling of the theme in Sonnet xxviii. of his collection of sonnets calledLicia(1593).

[79]‘Excellencie of the English Tongue’ in Camden’sRemaines, p. 43.

[80]All these and all that els the Comick StageWith seasoned wit and goodly pleasance graced,By which mans life in his likest imageWas limned forth, are wholly now defaced . . .And he, the man whom Nature selfe had madeTo mock her selfe and Truth to imitate,With kindly counter under mimick shade,Our pleasant Willy, ah! is dead of late;With whom all joy and jolly merimentIs also deaded and in dolour drent.—(ll. 199-210).

[81a]A note to this effect, in a genuine early seventeenth-century hand, was discovered by Halliwell-Phillipps in a copy of the 1611 edition of Spenser’sWorks(cf.Outlines, ii. 394-5).

[81b]

But that same gentle spirit, from whose penLarge streames of bonnie and sweete nectar flowe,Scorning the boldnes of such base-borne menWhich dare their follies forth so rashlie throwe,Doth rather choose to sit in idle cellThan so himselfe to mockerie to sell (ll. 217-22).

[83]Section IX. of the Appendix to this volume gives a sketch of each of the numerous collections of sonnets which bore witness to the unexampled vogue of the Elizabethan sonnet between 1591 and 1597.

[84]Minto,Characteristics of English Poetry, 1885, pp. 371, 382. The sonnet, headed ‘Phaeton to his friend Florio,’ runs:

Sweet friend whose name agrees with thy increaseHow fit arrival art thou of the Spring!For when each branch hath left his flourishing,And green-locked Summer’s shady pleasures cease:She makes the Winter’s storms repose in peace,And spends her franchise on each living thing:The daisies sprout, the little birds do sing,Herbs, gums, and plants do vaunt of their release.So when that all our English Wits lay dead,(Except the laurel that is ever green)Thou with thy Fruit our barrenness o’erspread,And set thy flowery pleasance to be seen.Such fruits, such flow’rets of morality,Were ne’er before brought out of Italy.

Cf. Shakespeare’s Sonnet xcviii. beginning:

When proud-pied April, dress’d in all his trim,Hath put a spirit of youth in everything.

But like descriptions of Spring and Summer formed a topic that was common to all the sonnets of the period. Much has been written of Shakespeare’s alleged acquaintance with Florio. Farmer and Warburton argue that Shakespeare ridiculed Florio in Holofernes inLove’s Labour’s Lost. They chiefly rely on Florio’s bombastic prefaces to hisWorlde of Wordesand his translation of Montaigne’sEssays(1603). There is nothing there to justify the suggestion. Florio writes more in the vein of Armado than of Holofernes, and, beyond the fact that he was a teacher of languages to noblemen, he bears no resemblance to Holofernes, a village schoolmaster. Shakespeare doubtless knew Florio as Southampton’sprotégé, and read his fine translation of Montaigne’sEssayswith delight. He quotes from it inThe Tempest: see p. 253.

[86]Shakespeare writes in his Sonnets:

My glass shall not persuade me I am old (xxii. 1.).But when my glass shows me myself indeed,Beated and chopp’d with tann’d antiquity (lxii. 9-10).That time of year thou mayst in me beholdWhen yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang (lxxiii. 1-2).My days are past the best (cxxxviii. 6).

Daniel inDelia(xxiii.) in 1591, when twenty-nine years old, exclaimed:

My years draw on my everlasting night,. . . My days are done.

Richard Barnfield, at the age of twenty, bade the boy Ganymede, to whom he addressed hisAffectionate Shepherdand a sequence of sonnets in 1594 (ed. Arber, p. 23):

Behold my gray head, full of silver hairs,My wrinkled skin, deep furrows in my face.

Similarly Drayton in a sonnet (Idea, xiv.) published in 1594, when he was barely thirty-one, wrote:

Looking into the glass of my youth’s miseries,I see the ugly face of my deformed caresWith withered brows all wrinkled with despairs;

and a little later (No. xliii. of the 1599 edition) he repeated how

Age rules my lines with wrinkles in my face.

All these lines are echoes of Petrarch, and Shakespeare and Drayton followed the Italian master’s words more closely than their contemporaries. Cf. Petrarch’s Sonnet cxliii. (to Laura alive), or Sonnet lxxxi. (to Laura after death); the latter begins:

Dicemi spesso il mio fidato speglio,L’animo stanco e la cangiata scorzaE la scemata mia destrezza e forza:Non ti nasconder più: tu se’ pur veglio.

(i.e.‘My faithful glass, my weary spirit and my wrinkled skin, and my decaying wit and strength repeatedly tell me: “It cannot longer be hidden from you, you are old.”’)

[88]The Sonnets of Sidney, Watson, Daniel, and Constable long circulated in manuscript, and suffered much the same fate as Shakespeare’s at the hands of piratical publishers. After circulating many years in manuscript, Sidney’s Sonnets were published in 1591 by an irresponsible trader, Thomas Newman, who in his self-advertising dedication wrote of the collection that it had been widely ‘spread abroad in written copies,’ and had ‘gathered much corruption by ill writers’ [i.e. copyists]. Constable produced in 1592 a collection of twenty sonnets in a volume which he entitled ‘Diana.’ This was an authorised publication. But in 1594 a printer and a publisher, without Constable’s knowledge or sanction, reprinted these sonnets and scattered them through a volume of nearly eighty miscellaneous sonnets by Sidney and many other hands; the adventurous publishers bestowed on their medley the title of ‘Diana,’ which Constable had distinctively attached to his own collection. Daniel suffered in much the same way. See Appendix IX. for further notes on the subject. Proofs of the commonness of the habit of circulating literature in manuscript abound. Fulke Greville, writing to Sidney’s father-in-law, Sir Francis Walsingham, in 1587, expressed regret that uncorrected manuscript copies of the then unprintedArcadiawere ‘so common.’ In 1591 Gabriel Cawood, the publisher of Robert Southwell’sMary Magdalen’s Funeral Tears, wrote that manuscript copies of the work had long flown about ‘fast and false.’ Nash, in the preface to hisTerrors of the Night, 1594, described how a copy of that essay, which a friend had ‘wrested’ from him, had ‘progressed [without his authority] from one scrivener’s shop to another, and at length grew so common that it was ready to be hung out for one of their figures [i.e.shop-signs], like a pair of indentures.’

[89a]Cf. Sonnet lxix. 12:

To thy fair flower add the rank smell of weeds.

[89b]For other instances of the application of this epithet to Shakespeare’s work, see p. 179, note 1.

[90]The actor Alleyn paid fivepence for a copy in that month (cf. Warner’sDulwich MSS.p. 92).

[91]The chief editions of the sonnets that have appeared, with critical apparatus, of late years are those of Professor Dowden (1875, reissued 1896), Mr. Thomas Tyler (1890), and Mr. George Wyndham, M.P. (1898). Mr. Gerald Massey’sSecret Drama of Shakespeare’s Sonnets—the text of the poems with a full discussion—appeared in a second revised edition in 1888. I regret to find myself in more or less complete disagreement with all these writers, although I am at one with Mr. Massey in identifying the young man to whom many of the sonnets were addressed with the Earl of Southampton. A short bibliography of the works advocating the theory that the sonnets were addressed to William, third Earl of Pembroke, is given in Appendix VI., ‘Mr. William Herbert,’ note 1.

[93]It has been wrongly inferred that Shakespeare asserts in Sonnets cxxxv-vi. and cxliii. that the young friend to whom he addressed some of the sonnets bore his own christian name of Will (see for a full examination of these sonnets Appendix VIII.) Further, it has been fantastically suggested that the line (xx. 7) describing the youth as ‘A man in hue, all hues in his controlling’ (i.e.a man in colour or complexion whose charms are so varied as to appear to give his countenance control of, or enable it to assume, all manner of fascinating hues or complexions), and other applications to the youth of the ordinary word ‘hue,’ imply that his surname was Hughes. There is no other pretence of argument for the conclusion, which a few critics have hazarded in all seriousness, that the friend’s name was William Hughes. There was a contemporary musician called William Hughes, but no known contemporary of the name, either in age or position in life, bears any resemblance to the young man who is addressed by Shakespeare in his sonnets.

[94]See Appendix VI., ‘Mr. William Herbert;’ and VII., ‘Shakespeare and the Earl of Pembroke.’

[95a]The full results of my researches into Thorpe’s history, his methods of business, and the significance of his dedicatory addresses, of which four are extant besides that prefixed to the volume of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in 1609, are given in Appendix V., ‘The True History of Thomas Thorpe and “Mr. W. H.”’

[95b]The form of fourteen-line stanza adopted by Shakespeare is in no way peculiar to himself. It is the type recognised by Elizabethan writers on metre as correct and customary in England long before he wrote. George Gascoigne, in hisCertayne Notes of Instruction concerning the making of Verse or Ryme in English(published in Gascoigne’sPosies, 1575), defined sonnets thus: ‘Fouretene lynes, every lyne conteyning tenne syllables. The first twelve to ryme in staves of foure lynes by cross metre and the last two ryming togither, do conclude the whole.’ In twenty-one of the 108 sonnets of which Sidney’s collection entitledAstrophel and Stellaconsists, the rhymes are on the foreign model and the final couplet is avoided. But these are exceptional. As is not uncommon in Elizabethan sonnet-collections, one of Shakespeare’s sonnets (xcix.) has fifteen lines; another (cxxvi.) has only twelve lines, and those in rhymed couplets (cf. Lodge’sPhillis, Nos. viii. and xxvi.) and a third (cxlv.) is in octosyllabics. But it is very doubtful whether the second and third of these sonnets rightly belong to Shakespeare’s collection. They were probably written as independent lyrics: see p. 97, note 1.

[96]If the critical ingenuity which has detected a continuous thread of narrative in the order that Thorpe printed Shakespeare’s sonnets were applied to the booksellers’ miscellany of sonnets calledDiana(1594), that volume, which rakes together sonnets on all kinds of amorous subjects from all quarters and numbers them consecutively, could be made to reveal the sequence of an individual lover’s moods quite as readily, and, if no external evidence were admitted, quite as convincingly, as Thorpe’s collection of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Almost all Elizabethan sonnets are not merely in the like metre, but are pitched in what sounds superficially to be the same key of pleading or yearning. Thus almost every collection gives at a first perusal a specious and delusive impression of homogeneity.

[97]Shakespeare merely warns his ‘lovely boy’ that, though he be now the ‘minion’ of Nature’s ‘pleasure,’ he will not succeed in defying Time’s inexorable law. Sidney addresses in a lighter vein Cupid—‘blind hitting boy,’ he calls him—in hisAstrophel(No. xlvi.) Cupid is similarly invoked in three of Drayton’s sonnets (No. xxvi. in the edition of 1594, and Nos. xxxiii. and xxxiv. in that of 1605), and in six in Fulke Greville’s collection entitledCœlica(cf. lxxxiv., beginning ‘Farewell, sweet boy, complain not of my truth’). Lyly, in hisSapho and Phao, 1584, and in hisMother Bombie, 1598, has songs of like temper addressed in the one case to ‘O Cruel love!’ and in the other to ‘O Cupid! monarch over kings.’ A similar theme to that of Shakespeare’s Sonnet cxxvi. is treated by John Ford in the song, ‘Love is ever dying,’ in his tragedy of theBroken Heart, 1633.

[98]See p. 113, note 2.

[101a]1547-1604. Cf. De Brach,Œuvres Poétiques, edited by Reinhold Dezeimeris, 1861, i. pp. 59-60.

[101b]See Appendix IX.

[101c]Section X. of the Appendix to this volume supplies a bibliographical note on the sonnet in France between 1550 and 1600, with a list of the sixteenth-century sonnetteers of Italy.

[101d]Gabriel Harvey, in hisPierces Supererogation(1593, p. 61), after enthusiastic commendation of Petrarch’s sonnets (‘Petrarch’s invention is pure love itself; Petrarch’s elocution pure beauty itself’), justifies the common English practice of imitating them on the ground that ‘all the noblest Italian, French, and Spanish poets have in their several veins Petrarchized; and it is no dishonour for the daintiest or divinest Muse to be his scholar, whom the amiablest invention and beautifullest elocution acknowledge their master.’ Both French and English sonnetteers habitually admit that they are open to the charge of plagiarising Petrarch’s sonnets to Laura (cf. Du Bellay’sLes Amours, ed. Becq de Fouquières, 1876, p. 186, and Daniel’sDelia, Sonnet xxxviii.) The dependent relations in which both English and French sonnetteers stood to Petrarch may be best realised by comparing such a popular sonnet of the Italian master as No. ciii. (or in some editions lxxxviii.) inSonetti in Vita di M. Laura, beginning ‘S’ amor non è, che dunque è quel ch’ i’ sento?’ with a rendering of it into French like that of De Baïf in hisAmours de Francine(ed. Becq de Fouquières, p. 121), beginning, ‘Si ce n’est pas Amour, que sent donques mon cœur?’ or with a rendering of the same sonnet into English like that by Watson in hisPassionate Century, No. v., beginning, ‘If ’t bee not love I feele, what is it then?’ Imitation of Petrarch is a constant characteristic of the English sonnet throughout the sixteenth century from the date of the earliest efforts of Surrey and Wyatt. It is interesting to compare the skill of the early and late sonnetteers in rendering the Italian master. Petrarch’s sonnetIn vita di M. Laura(No. lxxx. or lxxxi., beginning ‘Cesare, poi che ‘l traditor d’ Egitto’) was independently translated both by Sir Thomas Wyatt, about 1530 (ed. Bell, p. 60), and by Francis Davison in hisPoetical Rhapsody(1602, ed. Bullen, i. 90). Petrarch’s sonnet (No. xcv. or cxiii.) was also rendered independently both by Wyatt (cf. Puttenham’sArte of English Poesie, ed. Arber, p. 23) and by Drummond of Hawthornden (ed. Ward, i. 100, 221).

[103a]Eight of Watson’s sonnets are, according to his own account, renderings from Petrarch; twelve are from Serafino dell’ Aquila (1466-1500); four each come from Strozza, an Italian poet, and from Ronsard; three from the Italian poet Agnolo Firenzuola (1493-1548); two each from the French poet, Etienne Forcadel, known as Forcatulus (1514?-1573), the Italian Girolamo Parabosco (fl.1548), and Æneas Sylvius; while many are based on passages from such authors as (among the Greeks) Sophocles, Theocritus, Apollonius of Rhodes (author of the epic ‘Argonautica’); or (among the Latins) Virgil, Tibullus, Ovid, Horace, Propertius, Seneca, Pliny, Lucan, Martial, and Valerius Flaccus; or (among other modern Italians) Angelo Poliziano (1454-1494) and Baptista Mantuanus (1448-1516); or (among other modern Frenchmen) Gervasius Sepinus of Saumur, writer of eclogues after the manner of Virgil and Mantuanus.

[103b]No importance can be attached to Drayton’s pretensions to greater originality than his neighbours. The very line in which he makes the claim (‘I am no pick-purse of another’s wit’) is a verbatim theft from a sonnet of Sir Philip Sidney.

[103c]Lodge’sMargarite, p. 79. See Appendix IX. for the text of Desportes’s sonnet (Diane, livre ii. No. iii.) and Lodge’s translation inPhillis. Lodge gave two other translations of the same sonnet of Desportes—in his romance ofRosalind(Hunterian Society’s reprint, p. 74), and in his volume of poems calledScillaes Metamorphosis(p. 44). Sonnet xxxiii. of Lodge’sPhillisis rendered with equal literalness from Ronsard. But Desportes was Lodge’s special master,

[104a]See Drummond’sPoems, ed. W. C. Ward, in Muses’ Library, 1894, i. 207 seq.

[104b]Sève’sDéliewas first published at Lyons in 1544.

[104c]1530-1579.

[105]In two of his century of sonnets (Nos. xiii. and xxiv. in 1594 edition, renumbered xxxii. and liii. in 1619 edition) Drayton hints that his ‘fair Idea’ embodied traits of an identifiable lady of his acquaintance, and he repeats the hint in two other short poems; but the fundamental principles of his sonnetteering exploits are defined explicitly in Sonnet xviii. in 1594 edition.

Some, when in rhyme, they of their loves do tell, . . .Only I call [i.e.I call only] on my divine Idea.

Joachim du Bellay, one of the French poets who anticipated Drayton in addressing sonnets to ‘L’Idée,’ left the reader in no doubt of his intent by concluding one poem thus:

Là, ô mon âme, au plus hault ciel guidée,Tu y pourras recognoistre l’IdéeDe la beauté qu’en ce monde j’adore.(Du Bellay’sOlive, No. cxiii., published in 1568.)

Là, ô mon âme, au plus hault ciel guidée,Tu y pourras recognoistre l’IdéeDe la beauté qu’en ce monde j’adore.

(Du Bellay’sOlive, No. cxiii., published in 1568.)

[106a]Ben Jonson pointedly noticed the artifice inherent in the metrical principles of the sonnet when he told Drummond of Hawthornden that ‘he cursed Petrarch for redacting verses to sonnets which he said were like that tyrant’s bed, where some who were too short were racked, others too long cut short.’ (Jonson’sConversation, p. 4).

[106b]See p. 121infra.

[107a]They were first printed by Dr. Grosart for the Chetham Society in 1873 in his edition of ‘the Dr. Farmer MS.,’ a sixteenth and seventeenth century commonplace book preserved in the Chetham Library at Manchester, pt. i. pp. 76-81. Dr. Grosart also included the poems in his edition of Sir John Davies’sWorks, 1876, ii. 53-62.

[107b]Davies’s Sonnet viii. is printed in Appendix IX.

[107c]See p. 127infra.

[108]Romeo and Juliet, II. iv. 41-4.

[110]Mr. Fleay in hisBiographical Chronicle of the English Stage, ii. 226 seq., gives a striking list of parallels between Shakespeare’s and Drayton’s sonnets which any reader of the two collections in conjunction could easily increase. Mr. Wyndham in his valuable edition of Shakespeare’sSonnets, p. 255, argues that Drayton was the plagiarist of Shakespeare, chiefly on bibliographical grounds, which he does not state quite accurately. One hundred sonnets belonging to Drayton’sIdeaseries are extant, but they were not all published by him at one time. Fifty-three were alone included in his first and only separate edition of 1594; six more appeared in a reprint ofIdeaappended to theHeroical Epistlesin 1599; twenty-four of these were gradually dropped and thirty-four new ones substituted in reissues appended to volumes of his writings issued respectively in 1600, 1602, 1603, and 1605. To the collection thus re-formed a further addition of twelve sonnets and a withdrawal of some twelve old sonnets were made in the final edition of Drayton’s works in 1619. There the sonnets number sixty-three. Mr. Wyndham insists that Drayton’s latest published sonnets have alone an obvious resemblance to Shakespeare’s sonnets, and that they all more or less reflect Shakespeare’s sonnets as printed by Thorpe in 1609. But the whole of Drayton’s century of sonnets except twelve were in print long before 1609, and it could easily be shown that the earliest fifty-three published in 1594 supply as close parallels with Shakespeare’s sonnets as any of the forty-seven published subsequently. Internal evidence suggests that all but one or two of Drayton’s sonnets were written by him in 1594, in the full tide of the sonnetteering craze. Almost all were doubtless in circulation in manuscript then, although only fifty-three were published in 1594. Shakespeare would have had ready means of access to Drayton’s manuscript collection. Mr. Collier reprinted all the sonnets that Drayton published between 1594 and 1619 in his edition of Drayton’s poems for the Roxburghe Club, 1856. Other editions of Drayton’s sonnets of this and the last century reprint exclusively the collection of sixty-three appended to the edition of his works in 1619.

[111]Almost all sixteenth-century sonnets on spring in the absence of the poet’s love (cf. Shakespeare’s Sonnets xcviii., xcix.) are variations on the sentiment and phraseology of Petrarch’s well-known sonnet xlii., ‘In morte di M. Laura,’ beginning:

Zefiro torna e ‘l bel tempo rimena,E i fiori e l’erbe, sua dolce famiglia,E garrir Progne e pianger Filomena,E primavera candida e vermiglia.Ridono i prati, e ‘l ciel si rasserena;Giove s’allegra di mirar sua figlia;L’aria e l’acqua e la terra è d’amor piena;Ogni animal d’amar si riconsiglia,Ma per me, lasso, tornano i più graviSospiri, che del cor profondo tragge, &c.

See a translation by William Drummond of Hawthornden in Sonnets, pt. ii. No. ix. Similar sonnets and odes on April, spring, and summer abound in French and English (cf. Becq de Fouquiere’sŒuvres choisies de J.-A. de Baïf, passim, andŒuvres choisies des Contemporains de Ronsard, p. 108 (by Remy Belleau), p. 129 (by Amadis Jamyn) et passim). For descriptions of night and sleep see especially Ronsard’sAmours(livre i. clxxxvi., livre ii. xxii.;Odes, livre iv. No. iv., and hisOdes RetranchéesinŒuvres, edited by Blanchemain, ii. 392-4.) Cf. Barnes’sParthenophe and Parthenophil, lxxxiii. cv.

[112a]Cf. Ronsard’sAmours, livre iv. clxxviii.;Amours pour Astrée, vi. The latter opens:

Il ne falloit, maistresse, autres tablettesPour vous graver que celles de mon cœurOù de sa main Amour, nostre vainqueur,Vous a gravée et vos grâces parfaites.

[112b]Cf. Spenser, lv.; Barnes’sParthenophe and Parthenophil, No. lxxvii.; Fulke Greville’sCœlica, No. vii.

[113a]A similar conceit is the topic of Shakespeare’s Sonnet xxiv. Ronsard’s Ode (livre iv. No. xx.) consists of a like dialogue between the heart and the eye. The conceit is traceable to Petrarch, whose Sonnet lv. or lxiii. (‘Occhi, piangete, accompagnate il core’) is a dialogue between the poet and his eyes, while his Sonnet xcix. or cxvii. is a companion dialogue between the poet and his heart. Cf. Watson’sTears of Fancie, xix. xx. (a pair of sonnets on the theme which closely resemble Shakespeare’s pair); Drayton’sIdea, xxxiii.; Barnes’sParthenophe and Parthenophil, xx., and Constable’sDiana, vi. 7.

[113b]The Greek epigram is inPalatine Anthology, ix. 627, and is translated into Latin inSelecta Epigrammata, Basel, 1529. The Greek lines relate, as in Shakespeare’s sonnets, how a nymph who sought to quench love’s torch in a fountain only succeeded in heating the water. An added detail Shakespeare borrowed from a very recent adaptation of the epigram in Giles Fletcher’sLicia, 1593 (Sonnet xxvii.), where the poet’s Love bathes in the fountain, with the result not only that ‘she touched the water and it burnt with Love,’ but also

Now by her means it purchased hath that blissWhich all diseases quickly can remove.

Similarly Shakespeare in Sonnet cliv. not merely states that the ‘cool well’ into which Cupid’s torch had fallen ‘from Love’s fire took heat perpetual,’ but also that it grew ‘a bath and healthful remedy for men diseased.’

[114a]In Greek poetry the topic is treated in Pindar’sOlympic Odes, xi., and in a fragment by Sappho, No. 16 in Bergk’sPoetæ Lyrici Græci. In Latin poetry the topic is treated in Ennius as quoted in Cicero,De Senectute, c. 207; in Horace’sOdes, iii. 30; in Virgil’sGeorgics, iii. 9; in Propertius, iii. 1; in Ovid’sMetamorphoses, xv. 871 seq.; and in Martial, x. 27 seq. Among French sonnetteers Ronsard attacked the theme most boldly. His odes and sonnets promise immortality to the persons to whom they are addressed with an extravagant and a monotonous liberality. The following lines from Ronsard’s Ode (livre i. No. vii.) ‘Au Seigneur Carnavalet,’ illustrate his habitual treatment of the theme:—

C’est un travail de bon-heurChanter les hommes louables,Et leur bastir un honneurSeul vainqueur des ans muables.Le marbre ou l’airain vestuD’un labeur vif par l’enclumeN’animent tant la vertuQue les Muses par la plume. . .Les neuf divines pucellesGardent ta gloire chez elles;Et mon luth, qu’ell’ont fait estreDe leurs secrets le grand prestre,Par cest hymne solennelRespandra dessus ta raceJe ne sçay quoy de sa graceQui te doit faire eternel.(Œuvres de Ronsard, ed. Blanchemain, ii. 58, 62.)

Les neuf divines pucellesGardent ta gloire chez elles;Et mon luth, qu’ell’ont fait estreDe leurs secrets le grand prestre,Par cest hymne solennelRespandra dessus ta raceJe ne sçay quoy de sa graceQui te doit faire eternel.

(Œuvres de Ronsard, ed. Blanchemain, ii. 58, 62.)

I quote two other instances from Ronsard on p. 116, note 1. Desportes was also prone to indulge in the same conceit; cf. hisCleonice, sonnet 62, which Daniel appropriated bodily in hisDeliaSonnet xxvi.) Desportes warns his mistress that she will live in his verse like the phœnix in fire.

[114b]Ed. Shuckburgh, p. 62.

[114c]Shakespeare Soc. p. 93

[115]Other references to the topic appear in Sonnets xix., liv., lxiii., lxv., lxxxi. and cvii.

[116]See the quotation from Ronsard on p. 114, note 1. This sonnet is also very like Ronsard’s Ode (livre v. No. xxxii.) ‘A sa Muse,’ which opens:

Plus dur que fer j’ay fini mon ouvrage,Que ‘an, dispos à demener les pas,Que l’eau, le vent ou le brulant orage,L’injuriant, ne ru’ront point à bas.Quand ce viendra que le dernier trespasM’assoupira d’un somme dur, à l’heure,Sous le tombeau tout Ronsard n’ira pas,Restant de luy la part meilleure. . .Sus donque, Muse, emporte au ciel la gloireQue j’ay gaignée, annonçant la victoireDont à bon droit je me voy jouissant. . .

Cf. also Ronsard’s Sonnet lxxii. inAmours(livre i.), where he declares that his mistress’s name

Victorieux des peuples et des roisS’en voleroit sus l’aile de ma ryme.

But Shakespeare, like Ronsard, knew Horace’s far-famed Ode (bk. iii. 30)

Exegi monumentum ære perenniusRegalique situ pyramidum altius,Quod non imber edax, non Aquilo impotensPossit diruere, aut innumerabilisAnnorum series, et fuga temporum.

Nor can there be any doubt that Shakespeare wrote with a direct reference to the concluding nine lines of Ovid’sMetamorphoses(xv. 871-9):

Jamque opus exegi, quod nec Jovis ira nec ignes,Nec poterit ferrum, nec edax abolere vetustas.Cum volet illa dies, quæ nil nisi corporis hujusJus habet, incerti spatium mihi finiat ævi;Parte tamen meliore mei super alta perennisAstra ferar nomenque erit indelebile nostrum.

This passage was familiar to Shakespeare in one of his favourite books—Golding’s translation of theMetamorphoses. Golding’s rendering opens:

Now have I brought a worke to end which neither Jove’s fierce wrathNor sword nor fire nor fretting age, with all the force it hathAre able to abolish quite, &c.

Meres, after his mention of Shakespeare’s sonnets in hisPalladis Tamia(1598), quotes parts of both passages from Horace and Ovid, and gives a Latin paraphrase of his own, which, he says, would fit the lips of our contemporary poets besides Shakespeare. The introduction of the name Mars into Meres’s paraphrase as well as into line 7 of Shakespeare’s Sonnet lv. led Mr. Tyler (on what are in any case very trivial grounds) to the assumption that Shakespeare was borrowing from his admiring critic, and was therefore writing after 1598, when Meres’s book was published. In Golding’s translation reference is made to Mars by name (the Latin here calls the god Gradivus) a few lines above the passage already quoted, and the word caught Shakespeare’s eye there. Shakespeare owed nothing to Meres’s paraphrase, but Meres probably owed much to passages in Shakespeare’s sonnets.

[118a]See Appendix VIII., ‘The Will Sonnets,’ for the interpretation of Shakespeare’s conceit and like efforts of Barnes.

[118b]Wires in the sense of hair was peculiarly distinctive of the sonnetteers’ affected vocabulary. Cf. Daniel’sDelia, 1591, No. xxvi., ‘And golden hair may change to silverwire;’ Lodge’sPhillis, 1595, ‘Made blush the beauties of her curlèdwire;’ Barnes’sParthenophil, sonnet xlviii., ‘Her hairs no grace of goldenwireswant.’ The comparison of lips with coral is not uncommon outside the Elizabethan sonnet, but it was universal there. Cf. ‘Coral-coloured lips’ (Zepheria, 1594, No. xxiii.); ‘No coral is her lip’ (Lodge’sPhillis, 1595, No. viii.) ‘Ce beau coral’ are the opening words of Ronsard’sAmours, livre i. No. xxiii., where a list is given of stones and metals comparable with women’s features.

[119a]Shakespeare adopted this phraseology of Sidney literally in both the play and the sonnet; while Sidney’s further conceit that the lady’s eyes are in ‘this mourning weed’ in order ‘to honour all their deaths who for her bleed’ is reproduced in Shakespeare’s Sonnet cxxxii.—one of the two under consideration—where he tells his mistress that her eyes ‘have put on black’ to become ‘loving mourners’ of him who is denied her love.

[119b]

O paradox! Black is the badge of hell,The hue of dungeons and the scowl of night.(Love’s Labour’s Lost, IV. iii. 254-5).To look like her are chimney-sweepers black,And since her time are colliers counted bright,And Ethiops of their sweet complexion crack.Dark needs no candle now, for dark is light (ib.266-9).

[121]The parody, which is not in sonnet form, is printed in Harvey’sLetter-book(Camden Soc. pp. 101-43).

[122]No. vii. of Jodelle’sContr’ Amoursruns thus:

Combien de fois mes vers ont-ils doréCes cheueux noirs dignes d’vne Meduse?Combien de fois ce teint noir qui m’amuse,Ay-ie de lis et roses coloré?Combien ce front de rides labouréAy-ie applani? et quel a fait ma MuseLe gros sourcil, où folle elle s’abuse,Ayant sur luy l’arc d’Amour figuré?Quel ay-ie fait son œil se renfonçant?Quel ay-ie fait son grand nez rougissant?Quelle sa bouche et ses noires dents quellesQuel ay-ie fait le reste de ce corps?Qui, me sentant endurer mille morts,Viuoit heureux de mes peines mortelles.(Jodelle’sŒuvres, 1597, pp. 91-94.)

(Jodelle’sŒuvres, 1597, pp. 91-94.)

With this should be compared Shakespeare’s sonnets cxxxvii., cxlviii., and cl. Jodelle’s feigned remorse for having lauded theblackhair and complexion of his mistress is one of the most singular of several strange coincidences. In No. vi. of hisContr’ AmoursJodelle, after reproaching his ‘traitres vers’ with having untruthfully described his siren as a beauty, concludes:

‘Ja si long temps faisant d’un Diable vn AngeVous m’ouurez l’œil en l’iniuste louange,Et m’aueuglez en l’iniuste tourment.

With this should be compared Shakespeare’s Sonnet cxliv., lines 9-10.

And whether that my angel be turn’d fiendSuspect I may, yet not directly tell.

A conventional sonnet or extravagant vituperation, which Drummond of Hawthornden translated from Marino (Rime, 1602, pt. i. p. 76), is introduced with grotesque inappropriateness into Drummond’s collection of ‘sugared’ sonnets (see pt. i. No. xxxv: Drummond’sPoems, ed. W. C. Ward, i. 69, 217).

[123]The theories that all the sonnets addressed to a woman were addressed to the ‘dark lady,’ and that the ‘dark lady’ is identifiable with Mary Fitton, a mistress of the Earl of Pembroke, are baseless conjectures. The extant portraits of Mary Fitton prove her to be fair. The introduction of her name into the discussion is solely due to the mistaken notion that Shakespeare was theprotégéof Pembroke, that most of the sonnets were addressed to him, and that the poet was probably acquainted with his patron’s mistress. See Appendix VII. The expressions in two of the vituperative sonnets to the effect that the disdainful mistress had ‘robb’d others’ beds’ revenues of their rents’ (cxlii. 8) and ‘in act her bed-vow broke’ (clii. 37) have been held to imply that the woman denounced by Shakespeare was married. The first quotation can only mean that she was unfaithful with married men, but both quotations seem to be general phrases of abuse, the meaning of which should not be pressed closely.

[127]‘Lover’ and ‘love’ in Elizabethan English were ordinary synonyms for ‘friend’ and ‘friendship.’ Brutus opens his address to the citizens of Rome with the words, ‘Romans, countrymen, andlovers,’ and subsequently describes Julius Cæsar as ‘my bestlover’ (Julius Cæsar, III. ii. 13-49). Portia, when referring to Antonio, the bosom friend of her husband Bassanio, calls him ‘the bosomloverof my lord’ (Merchant of Venice, III. iv. 17). Ben Jonson in his letters to Donne commonly described himself as his correspondent’s ‘ever truelover;’ and Drayton, writing to William Drummond of Hawthornden, informed him that an admirer of his literary work was in love with him. The word ‘love’ was habitually applied to the sentiment subsisting between an author and his patron. Nash, when dedicatingJack Wiltonin 1594 to Southampton, calls him ‘a dearlover. . . of theloversof poets as of the poets themselves.’

[128]There is little doubt that this sonnet was parodied by Sir John Davies in the ninth and last of his ‘gulling’ sonnets, in which he ridicules the notion that a man of wit should put his wit in vassalage to any one.

To love my lord I do knight’s service owe,And therefore now he hath my wit in ward;But while it [i.e.the poet’s wit] is in his tuition soMethinks he doth intreat [i.e.treat] it passing hard . . .But why should love after minority(When I have passed the one and twentieth year)Preclude my wit of his sweet liberty,And make it still the yoke of wardship bear?I fear he [i.e.my lord] hath another title [i.e.right to my wit] gotAnd holds my wit now for an idiot.

[129]Mr. Tyler assigns this sonnet to the year 1598 or later, on the fallacious ground that this line was probably imitated from an expression in Marston’sPigmalion’s Image, published in 1598, where ‘stanzas’ are said to ‘march rich bedight in warlike equipage.’ The suggestion of plagiarism is quite gratuitous. The phrase was common in Elizabethan literature long before Marston employed it. Nash, in his preface to Green’sMenaphon, which was published in 1589, wrote that the works of the poet Watson ‘march in equipage of honour with any of your ancient poets.’

[131a]See Appendix IV. for a full account of Southampton’s relations with Nash and other men of letters.

[131b]See p. 85, note.

[134a]Cf.Parthenophil, Madrigal i. line 12; Sonnet xvii. line 9.

[134b]Parthenophil, Sonnet xci.

[135]Much irrelevance has been introduced into the discussion of Chapman’s claim to be the rival poet. Prof. Minto in hisCharacteristics of English Poets, p. 291, argued that Chapman was the man mainly because Shakespeare declared his competitor to be taught to write by ‘spirits’—‘his compeers by night’—as well as by ‘an affable familiar ghost’ which gulled him with intelligence at night (lxxxvi. 5 seq.) Professor Minto saw in these phrases allusions to some remarks by Chapman in hisShadows of Night(1594), a poem on Night. There Chapman warned authors in one passage that the spirit of literature will often withhold itself from them unless it have ‘drops of their blood like a heavenly familiar,’ and in another place sportively invited ‘nimble and aspiring wits’ to join him in consecrating their endeavours to ‘sacred night.’ There is really no connection between Shakespeare’s theory of the supernatural and nocturnal sources of his rival’s influence and Chapman’s trite allusion to the current faith in the power of ‘nightly familiars’ over men’s minds and lives, or Chapman’s invitation to his literary comrades to honour Night with him. It is supererogatory to assume that Shakespeare had Chapman’s phrases in his mind when alluding to superstitions which were universally acknowledged. It could be as easily argued on like grounds that Shakespeare was drawing on other authors. Nash in his prose tract called independentlyThe Terrors of the Night, which was also printed in 1594, described the nocturnal habits of ‘familiars’ more explicitly than Chapman. The publisher Thomas Thorpe, in dedicating in 1600 Marlowe’s translation of Lucan (bk. i.) to his friend Edward Blount, humorously referred to the same topic when he reminded Blount that ‘this spirit [i.e.Marlowe], whose ghost or genius is to be seen walk the Churchyard [of St. Paul’s] in at the least three or four sheets . . . was sometime afamiliarof your own.’ On the strength of these quotations, and accepting Professor Minto’s line of argument, Nash, Thorpe, or Blount, whose ‘familiar’ is declared to have been no less a personage than Marlowe, has as good a claim as Chapman to be the rival poet of Shakespeare’s sonnets. A second and equally impotent argument in Chapman’s favour has been suggested. Chapman in the preface to his translation of theIliads(1611 ) denounces without mentioning any name ‘a certain envious windsucker that hovers up and down, laboriously engrossing all the air with his luxurious ambition, and buzzing into every ear my detraction.’ It is suggested that Chapman here retaliated on Shakespeare for his references to him as his rival in the sonnets; but it is out of the question that Chapman, were he the rival, should have termed those high compliments ‘detraction.’ There is no ground for identifying Chapman’s ‘windsucker’ with Shakespeare (cf. Wyndham, p. 255). The strongest point in favour of the theory of Chapman’s identity with the rival poet lies in the fact that each of the two sections of his poemThe Shadow of the Night(1594) is styled a ‘hymn,’ and Shakespeare in Sonnet lxxxv. 6-7 credits his rival with writing ‘hymns.’ But Drayton, in hisHarmonie of the Church, 1591, and Barnes, as we have just seen, both wrote ‘hymns.’ The word was not loosely used in Elizabethan English, as in sixteenth-century French, in the general sense of ‘poem.’

[136]See p. 127, note I.

[137]Sir Walter Ralegh was wont to apostrophise his aged sovereign thus:

Oh, hopeful love, my object and invention,Oh, true desire, the spur of my conceit,Oh, worthiest spirit, my mind’s impulsion,Oh, eyes transparent, my affection’s bait;Oh, princely form, my fancy’s adamant,Divine conceit, my pain’s acceptance,Oh, all in one! Oh, heaven on earth transparent!The seat of joy and love’s abundance!

(Cf.Cynthia, a fragment inPoems of Raleigh, ed. Hannah, p. 33.) When Ralegh leaves Elizabeth’s presence he tell us his ‘forsaken heart’ and his ‘withered mind’ were ‘widowed of all the joys’ they ‘once possessed.’ Only some 500 lines (the twenty-first book and a fragment of another book) survive of Ralegh’s poemCynthia, the whole of which was designed to prove his loyalty to the Queen, and all the extant lines are in the same vein as those I quote. The complete poem extended to twenty-two books, and the lines exceeded 10,000, or five times as many as in Shakespeare’s sonnets. Richard Barnfield in his like-named poem ofCynthia, 1595, and Fulke Greville in sonnets addressed to Cynthia, also extravagantly described the Queen’s beauty and graces. In 1599 Sir John Davies, poet and lawyer, apostrophised Elizabeth, who was then sixty-six years old, thus:

Fair soul, since to the fairest body knitYou give such lively life, such quickening power,Such sweet celestial influences to itAs keeps it still in youth’s immortal flower . . .O many, many years may you remainA happy angel to this happy land (Nosce Teipsum, dedication).

Davies published in the same year twenty-six ‘Hymnes of Astrea’ on Elizabeth’s beauty and graces; each poem forms an acrostic on the words ‘Elizabetha Regina,’ and the language of love is simulated on almost every page.

[138a]Apologie for Poetrie(1595), ed. Shuckburgh, p. 62.

[138b]Adulatory sonnets to patrons are met with in the preliminary or concluding pages of numerous sixteenth and seventeenth century books (e.g.the collection of sonnets addressed to James VI of Scotland in hisEssayes of a Prentise, 1591, and the sonnets to noblemen before Spenser’sFaerie Queene, at the end of Chapman’sIliad, and at the end of John Davies’sMicrocosmos, 1603). Other sonnets to patrons are scattered through collections of occasional poems, such as Ben Jonson’sForestandUnderwoodsand Donne’sPoems. Sonnets addressed to men are not only found in the preliminary pages, but are occasionally interpolated in sonnet-sequences of fictitious love. Sonnet xi. in Drayton’s sonnet-fiction called ‘Idea’ (in 1599 edition) seems addressed to a man, in much the same manner as Shakespeare often addressed his hero; and a few others of Drayton’s sonnets are ambiguous as to the sex of their subject. John Soothern’s eccentric collection of love-sonnets,Pandora(1584), has sonnets dedicatory to the Earl of Oxford; and William Smith in hisChloris(1596) (a sonnet-fiction of the conventional kind) in two prefatory sonnets and in No. xlix. of the substantive collection invokes the affectionate notice of Edmund Spenser. Throughout Europe ‘dedicatory’ sonnets or poems to women betray identical characteristics to those that were addressed to men. The poetic addresses to the Countess of Bedford and other noble patronesses of Donne, Ben Jonson, and their colleagues are always affectionate, often amorous, in their phraseology, and akin in temper to Shakespeare’s sonnets of friendship. Nicholas Breton, in his poemThe Pilgrimage to Paradise coyned with the Countess of Pembroke’s Love, 1592, and another work of his,The Countess of Pembroke’s Passion(first printed from manuscript in 1867), pays the Countess, who was merely his literary patroness, a homage which is indistinguishable from the ecstatic utterances of a genuine and overmastering passion. The difference in the sex of the persons addressed by Breton and by Shakespeare seems to place their poems in different categories, but they both really belonged to the same class. They both merely display aprotégé’sloyalty to his patron, couched, according to current convention, in the strongest possible terms of personal affection. In Italy and France exactly the same vocabulary of adoration was applied by authors indifferently to patrons and patronesses. It is known that one series of Michael Angelo’s impassioned sonnets was addressed to a young nobleman Tommaso dei Cavalieri, and another series to a noble patroness Vittoria Colonna, but the tone is the same in both, and internal evidence fails to enable the critic to distinguish between the two series. Only one English contemporary of Shakespeare published a long series of sonnets addressed to a man who does not prove on investigation to have been a professional patron. In 1595 Richard Barnfield appended to his poemCynthiaa set of twenty sonnets, in which he feignedly avowed affection for a youth called Ganymede. These poems do not belong to the same category as Shakespeare’s, but to the category of sonnet-sequences of love in which it was customary to invoke a fictitious mistress. Barnfield explained that in his sonnets he attempted a variation on the conventional practice by fancifully adapting to the sonnet-form the second of Virgil’sEclogues, in which the shepherd Corydon apostrophises the shepherd-boy Alexis.

[140a]Cf. Sonnet lix.

Show me your image in some antique book . . .Oh sure I am the wits of former daysTo subjects worse have given admiring praise.

[140b]Campion’sPoems, ed. Bullen, pp. 148 seq. Cf. Shakespeare’s sonnets:

O how I faint when I of you do write.—(lxxx. 1.)Finding thy worth a limit past my praise.—(lxxxii. 6.)

[141]Donne’sPoems(in Muses’ Library), ii. 34. See also Donne’s sonnets and verse-letters to Mr. Rowland Woodward and Mr. I. W.

[142]See p. 386 note 1.

[143a]Three years was the conventional period which sonnetteers allotted to the development of their passion. Cf. Ronsard,Sonnets pour Hélène(No. xiv.), beginning: ‘Trois ans sont ja passez que ton œil me tient pris.’

[143b]Octavius Cæsar at thirty-two is described by Mark Antony after the battle of Actium as the ‘boy Cæsar’ who ‘wears the rose of youth’ (Antony and Cleopatra, III. ii. 17 seq.) Spenser in hisAstrophelapostrophises Sir Philip Sidney on his death near the close of his thirty-second year as ‘oh wretched boy’ (l. 133) and ‘luckless boy’ (l. 142). Conversely it was a recognised convention among sonnetteers to exaggerate their own age. See p. 86, note.

[144]Two portraits, representing the Earl in early manhood, are at Welbeck Abbey, and are described above. Of the remaining seven paintings, two are assigned to Van Somer, and represent the Earl in early middle age; one, a half-length, a very charming picture, now belongs to James Knowles, Esq., of Queen Anne’s Lodge; the other, a full-length in drab doublet and hose, is in the Shakespeare Memorial Gallery at Stratford-on-Avon. Mireveldt twice painted the Earl at a later period of his career; one of the pictures is now at Woburn Abbey, the property of the Duke of Bedford, the other is at the National Portrait Gallery. A fifth picture, assigned to Mytens, belongs to Viscount Powerscourt; a sixth, by an unknown artist, belongs to Mr. Wingfield Digby, and the seventh (in armour) is in the Master’s Lodge at St. John’s College, Cambridge, where Southampton was educated. The miniature by Isaac Oliver, which also represents Southampton in late life, was formerly in Dr. Lumsden Propert’s collection. It now belongs to a collector at Hamburg. The two miniatures assigned to Peter Oliver belong respectively to Mr. Jeffery Whitehead and Sir Francis Cook, Bart. (Cf. Catalogue of Exhibition of Portrait Miniatures at the Burlington Fine Arts Club, London, 1889, pp. 32, 71, 100.) In all the best preserved of these portraits the eyes are blue and the hair a dark shade of auburn. Among the middle-life portraits Southampton appears to best advantage in the one by Van Somer belonging to Mr. James Knowles.

[145]I describe these pictures from a personal inspection of them which the Duke kindly permitted me to make.

[146a]Cf. Shakespeare’s Sonnet iii.:

Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in theeCalls back the lovely April of her prime.

[146b]Southampton’s singularly long hair procured him at times unwelcome attentions. When, in January 1598, he struck Ambrose Willoughby, an esquire of the body, for asking him to break off owing to the lateness of the hour, a game of primero that he was playing in the royal chamber at Whitehall, the esquire Willoughby is stated to have retaliated by ‘pulling off some of the Earl’s locks.’ On the incident being reported to the Queen, she ‘gave Willoughby, in the presence, thanks for what he did’ (Sydney Papers, ii. 83).

[148a]These quotations are fromSorrowes Joy, a collection of elegies on Queen Elizabeth by Cambridge writers (Cambridge, 1603), and from Chettle’sEngland’s Mourning Garment, London, 1603).

[148b]Gervase Markham’sHonour in her Perfection, 1624.

[149a]Manningham’sDiary, Camden Soc., p. 148.

[149b]Court and Times of James I, I. i. 7.

[149c]See Appendix IV.

[152]The fine exordium of Sonnet cxix.:

What potions have I drunk of Siren tears,Distill’d from limbecks foul as hell within,

adopts expressions in Barnes’s vituperative sonnet (No xlix.), where, after denouncing his mistress as a ‘siren,’ the poet incoherently ejaculates:

From my love’s limbeck [sc.have I] still [di]stilled tears!

Almost every note in the scale of sadness or self-reproach is sounded from time to time in Petrarch’s sonnets. Tasso inScelta delle Rime, 1582, p. ii. p. 26, has a sonnet (beginning ‘Vinca fortuna homai, se sotto il peso’) which adumbrates Shakespeare’s Sonnets xxix. (‘When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes’) and lxvi. (‘Tired with all these, for restful death I cry’). Drummond of Hawthornden translated Tasso’s sonnet in his sonnet (part i. No. xxxiii.); while Drummond’s Sonnets xxv. (‘What cruel star into this world was brought’) and xxxii. (‘If crost with all mishaps be my poor life’) are pitched in the identical key.

[153a]Sidney’sCertain Sonnets(No. xiii.) appended toAstrophel and Stellain the edition of 1598. InEmaricdulfe:Sonnets written by E. C., 1595, Sonnet xxxvii. beginning ‘O lust, of sacred love the foul corrupter,’ even more closely resembles Shakespeare’s sonnet in both phraseology and sentiment. E. C.’s rare volume is reprinted in theLamport Garland(Roxburghe Club), 1881.

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