Chapter 22

[309c]It has been mutilated by a former owner, and the signature of the leaf is missing, but it was presumably G G 3.

[310]Correspondents inform me that two copies of the First Folio, one formerly belonging to Leonard Hartley and the other to Bishop Virtue of Portsmouth, showed a somewhat similar irregularity. Both copies were bought by American booksellers, and I have not been able to trace them.

[311]Cf.Notes and Queries, 1st ser., vii. 47.

[312a]Arber,Stationers’ Registers, iii. 242-3.

[312b]On January 31, 1852, Collier announced in theAthenæum, that this copy, which had been purchased by him for thirty shillings, and bore on the outer cover the words ‘Tho. Perkins his Booke,’ was annotated throughout by a former owner in the middle of the seventeenth century. Shortly afterwards Collier published all the ‘essential’ manuscript readings in a volume entitledNotes and Emendations to the Plays of Shakespeare. Next year he presented the folio to the Duke of Devonshire. A warm controversy as to the date and genuineness of the corrections followed, but in 1859 all doubt as to their origin was set at rest by Mr. N. E. S. A. Hamilton of the manuscript department of the British Museum, who in letters to theTimesof July 2 and 16 pronounced all the manuscript notes to be recent fabrications in a simulated seventeenth-century hand.

[314]The best account of eighteenth-century criticism of Shakespeare is to be found in the preface to the Cambridge edition by Mr. Aldis Wright. The memoirs of the various editors in theDictionary of National Biographysupply useful information. I have made liberal use of these sources in the sketch given in the following pages.

[317a]Mr. Churton Collins’s admirable essay on Theobald’s textua criticism of Shakespeare, entitled ‘The Porson of Shakespearean Critics,’ is reprinted from theQuarterly Reviewin hisEssays and Studies, 1895, pp. 263 et seq.

[317b]Collier doubtless followed Theobald’s hint when he pretended to have found in his ‘Perkins Folio’ the extremely happy emendation (now generally adopted) of ‘bisson multitude’ for ‘bosom multiplied’ in Coriolanus’s speech:

How shall this bisson multitude digestThe senate’s courtesy?—(Coriolanus, III. i. 131-2.)

[318]A happy example of his shrewdness may be quoted fromKing Lear, III. vi. 72, where in all previous editions Edgar’s enumeration of various kinds of dogs included the line ‘Hound or spaniel, brach or hym [or him].’ For the last word Hanmer substituted ‘lym,’ which was the Elizabethan synonym for bloodhound.

[320]Edition of 1793, vol. i. p. 7.

[327a]Cf. the opening line of Matthew Arnold’s Sonnet on Shakespeare:

Others abide our question. Thou art free.

[327b]These letters have been interpreted as standing for the inscription ‘In Memoriam Scriptoris’ as well as for the name of the writer. In the latter connection, they have been variously and inconclusively read as Jasper Mayne (Student), a young Oxford writer; as John Marston (Student or Satirist); and as John Milton (Senior or Student).

[328]Charles Gildon in 1694, in ‘Some Reflections on Mr. Rymer’s Short View of Tragedy’ which he addressed to Dryden, gives the classical version of this incident. ‘To give the world,’ Gildon informs Dryden, ‘some satisfaction that Shakespear has had as great a Veneration paid his Excellence by men of unquestion’d parts as this I now express of him, I shall give some account of what I have heard from your Mouth, Sir, about the noble Triumph he gain’d over all the Ancients by the Judgment of the ablest Critics of that time. The Matter of Fact (if my Memory fail me not) was this. Mr.Halesof Eaton affirm’d that he wou’d shew all the Poets of Antiquity outdone by Shakespear, in all the Topics, and common places made use of in Poetry. The Enemies of Shakespear wou’d by no means yield him so much Excellence: so that it came to a Resolution of a trial of skill upon that Subject; the place agreed on for the Dispute was Mr. Hales’s Chamber at Eaton; a great many Books were sent down by the Enemies of this Poet, and on the appointed day my Lord Falkland, Sir John Suckling, and all the Persons of Quality that had Wit and Learning, and interested themselves in the Quarrel, met there, and upon a thorough Disquisition of the point, the Judges chose by agreement out of this Learned and Ingenious Assembly unanimously gave the Preference to Shakespear. And the Greek and Roman Poets were adjudg’d to Vail at least their Glory in that of the English Hero.’

[329a]Milton,Iconoclastes, 1690, pp. 9-10.

[329b]Cf. Evelyn’sDiary, November 26, 1661: ‘I saw Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, played, but now the old plays began to disgust the refined age, since His Majesty’s being so long abroad.’

[330a]Conquest of Granada, 1672.

[330b]Essay on Dramatic Poesie, 1668. Some interesting, if more qualified, criticism by Dryden also appears in his preface to an adaptation of ‘Troilus and Cressida’ in 1679. In the prologue to his and D’Avenant’s adaptation of ‘The Tempest’ in 1676, he wrote:

But Shakespeare’s magic could not copied be;Within that circle none durst walk but he.

[332a]Cf.Shakspere’s Century of Praise, 1591-1693, New Shakspere Soc., ed. Ingleby and Toulmin Smith, 1879; andFresh Allusions, ed. Furnivall, 1886.

[332b]Cf. W. Sidney Walker,Critical Examination of the Text of Shakespeare, 1859.

[333]SeeNotes and Lectures on Shakespeare and other Poets by S. T. Coleridge,now first collected by T. Ashe, 1883. Coleridge hotly resented the remark, which he attributed to Wordsworth, that a German critic first taught us to think correctly concerning Shakespeare. (Coleridge to Mudford, 1818; cf. Dykes Campbell’s memoir of Coleridge, p. cv.) But there is much to be said for Wordsworth’s general view (see p. 344, note 1).

[334]R. E. Hunter,Shakespeare and the Tercentenary Celebration, 1864.

[335]Thomas Jordan, a very humble poet, wrote a prologue to notify the new procedure, and referred to the absurdity of the old custom:

For to speak truth, men act, that are betweenForty and fifty, wenches of fifteenWith bone so large and nerve so uncompliant,When you callDesdemona, enterGiant.

[338]Essays of Elia, ed. Canon Ainger, pp. 180 et seq.

[340a]Hamletin 1874-5 andMacbethin 1888-9 were each performed by Sir Henry Irving for 200 nights in uninterrupted succession; these are the longest continuous runs that any of Shakespeare’s plays are known to have enjoyed.

[340b]See p. 346.

[341]Cf. Alfred Roffe,Shakspere Music, 1878;Songs in Shakspere. . .set to Music, 1884, New Shakspere Soc.

[342]Cf. D. G. Morhoff,Unterricht von der teutschen Sprache und Poesie, Kiel, 1682, p. 250.

[344]In his ‘Essay Supplementary to the Preface’ in the edition of hisPoemsof 1815 Wordsworth wrote: ‘The Germans, only of foreign nations, are approaching towards a knowledge of what he [i.e.Shakespeare] is. In some respects they have acquired a superiority over the fellow-countrymen of the poet; for among us, it is a common—I might say an established—opinion that Shakespeare is justly praised when he is pronounced to be “a wild irregular genius in whom great faults are compensated by great beauties.” How long may it be before this misconception passes away and it becomes universally acknowledged that the judgment of Shakespeare . . . is not less admirable than his imagination? . . .’

[345]Cf.Wilhelm Meister.

[346a]Cf.Jahrbuch der Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaftfor 1894.

[346b]Ibid.1896, p. 438.

[347]The exact statistics for 1896 and 1897 were: ‘Othello,’ acted 135 and 121 times for the respective years; ‘Hamlet,’ 102 and 91; ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ 95 and 118; ‘Taming of the Shrew,’ 91 and 92; ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ 84 and 62; ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ 68 and 92; ‘A Winter’s Tale,’ 49 and 65; ‘Much Ado about Nothing,’ 47 and 32; ‘Lear,’ 41 and 34; ‘As You Like It,’ 37 and 29; ‘Comedy of Errors,’ 29 and 43; ‘Julius Cæsar,’ 27 and 29; ‘Macbeth,’ 10 and 12; ‘Timon of Athens,’ 7 and 0; ‘The Tempest,’ 5 and 1; ‘Antony and Cleopatra,’ 2 and 4; ‘Coriolanus,’ 0 and 20; ‘Cymbeline,’ 0 and 4; ‘Richard II,’ 15 and 5; ‘Henry IV,’ Part I, 26 and 23, Part II, 6 and 13; ‘Henry V,’ 4 and 7; ‘Henry VI,’ Part I, 3 and 5, Part II, 2 and 2; ‘Richard III,’ 25 and 26 (Jahrbuch der Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaftfor 1897, pp. 306 seq., and for 1898, pp. 440 seq.)

[348a]Jusserand,A French Ambassador, p. 56.

[348b]Cf. Al. Schmidt,Voltaire’s Verdienst von der Einführung Shakespeare’s in Frankreich, Konigsberg, 1864.

[350a]Frederic Melchior, Baron Grimm (1723-1807), for some years a friend of Rousseau and the correspondent of Diderot and theencyclopédistes, scattered many appreciative references to Shakespeare in his voluminousCorrespondance Littéraire Philosophique et Critique, extending over the period 1753-1770, the greater part of which was published in 16 vols. 1812-13.

[350b]Mélanges Historiques, 182 ?, iii. 141-87.

[350c]Ibid.1824, iii. 217-34.

[351a]Very interesting comments on these performances appeared day by day in the Paris newspaperLe Globe. They were by Charles Magnin, who reprinted them in hisCauseries et Méditations Historiques et Littéraires(Paris, 1843, ii. 62 et seq.)

[351b]Cf. Lacroix,Histoire de l’Influence de Shakespeare sur le Théâtre Français, 1867;Edinburgh Review; 1849, pp. 39-77; Elze,Essays, pp. 193 seq.; M. Jusserand,Shakespeare en France sous l’Ancien Régime, Paris, 1898.

[352]Cf. Giovanni Andres,Dell’ Origine,Progressi e Stato attuale d’ ogni Letteratura, 1782.

[353a]Cf.New Shaksp. Soc. Trans.1880-5, pt. ii. 431 seq.

[353b]Cf.Ungarische Revue(Budapest) Jan. 1881, pp. 81-2; and August Greguss’s Shakspere . . . elsö kötet: Shakspere pályája Budapest, 1880 (an account in Hungarian of Shakespeare’s Life and Works).

[354]Cf.Macmillan’s Magazine, May 1880.

[361]Compiled between 1669 and 1696; first printed inLetters from the Bodleian Library, 1813, and admirably re-edited for the Clarendon Press during the present year by the Rev. Andrew Clark (2 vols.)

[362]See pp. 367-8.

[364]The earliest attempts at a concordance wereA Complete Verbal Index to the Plays, by F. Twiss (1805), andAn Index to the Remarkable Passages and Wordsby Samuel Ayscough (1827), but these are now superseded.

[366a]Jordan’sCollections, including this fraudulent will of Shakespeare’s father, was printed privately by J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps in 1864.

[366b]See p. 267.

[367a]Reference has already been made to the character of the manuscript corrections made by Collier in a copy of the Second Folio of 1632, known as the Perkins Folio. See p. 312, note 2. The chief authorities on the subject of the Collier forgeries are:An Inquiry into the Genuineness of the Manuscript Corrections in Mr. J. Payne Collier’s Annotated Shakspere Folio,1632,and of certain Shaksperian Documents likewise published by Mr. Collier, by N. E. S. A. Hamilton, London, 1860;A Complete View of the Shakespeare Controversy concerning the Authenticity and Genuineness of Manuscript Matter affecting the Works and Biography of Shakspere,published by J. Payne Collier as the Fruits of his Researches, by C. M. Ingleby, LL.D. of Trinity College, Cambridge, London, 1865;Catalogue of the Manuscripts and Muniments of Alleyn’s College of God’s Gift at Dulwich, by George F. Warner, M.A., 1881;Notes on the Life of James Payne Collier,with a Complete List of his Works and an Account of such Shakespeare Documents as are believed to be spurious, by Henry B. Wheatley, London, 1884.

[367b]SeeCalendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1595-7, p. 310.

See WarnersCatalogue of Dulwich MSS.pp. 24-6.

[368b]Cf.ibid.pp. 26-7.

[369a]See p. 235, note I.

[369b]Cf. Warner’sDulwich MSS.pp.30-31.

[369c]See p. 254, note I.

[370]Most of those that are commonly quoted are phrases in ordinary use by all writers of the day. The only point of any interest raised in the argument from parallelisms of expression centres about a quotation from Aristotle which Bacon and Shakespeare not merely both make, but make in what looks at a first glance to be the same erroneous form. Aristotle wrote in hisNicomachean Ethics, i. 8, that young men were unfitted for the study ofpoliticalphilosophy. Bacon, in theAdvancement of Learning(1605), wrote: ‘Is not the opinion of Aristotle worthy to be regarded wherein he saith that young men are not fit auditors ofmoralphilosophy?’ (bk. ii. p. 255, ed. Kitchin). Shakespeare, about 1603, inTroilus and Cressida, II. ii. 166, wrote of ‘young men whom Aristotle thought unfit to hearmoralphilosophy.’ But the alleged error of substitutingmoralforpoliticalphilosophy in Aristotle’s text is more apparent than real. By ‘political’ philosophy Aristotle, as his context amply shows, meant the ethics of civil society, which are hardly distinguishable from what is commonly called ‘morals.’ In the summary paraphrase of Aristotle’sEthicswhich was translated into English from the Italian, and published in 1547, the passage to which both Shakespeare and Bacon refer is not rendered literally, but its general drift is given as a warning that moral philosophy is not a fit subject for study by youths who are naturally passionate and headstrong. Such an interpretation of Aristotle’s language is common among sixteenth and seventeenth century writers. Erasmus, in the epistle at the close of his popularColloquia(Florence, 1530, sig. Q Q), wrote of his endeavour to insinuate serious precepts ‘into the minds of young men whom Aristotle rightly described as unfit auditors of moral philosophy’ (‘in animos adolescentium, quos recte scripsit Aristoteles inidoneos auditores ethicæ philosophiæ’). In a French translation of theEthicsby the Comte de Plessis, published at Paris in 1553, the passage is rendered ‘parquoy le ieune enfant n’est suffisant auditeur de la science civile;’ and an English commentator (in a manuscript note written about 1605 in a copy of the book in the British Museum) turned the sentence into English thus: ‘Whether a young man may bee a fitte scholler ofmorallphilosophie.’ In 1622 an Italian essayist, Virgilio Malvezzi, in his preface to hisDiscorsi sopra Cornelio Tacito, has the remark, ‘E non è discordante da questa mia opinione Aristotele, it qual dice, che i giovani non sono buoni ascultatori dellemorali’ (cf. Spedding,Works of Bacon, i. 739, iii. 440).

[371]Cf. Birch,Letters of Bacon, 1763, p. 392. A foolish suggestion has been made that Matthew was referring to Francis Bacon’s brother Anthony, who died in 1601; Matthew was writing of a man who was alive more than twenty years later.

[372]Cf.Lifeby Theodore Bacon, London, 1888.

[374a]See pp. 4, 77, 127.

[374b]See p. 126.

[375a]Gervase Markham,Honour in his Perfection, 1624.

[375b]Loseley MSS.ed. A. J. Kempe, p. 240.

[375c]His mother, after thirteen years of widowhood, married in 1594 Sir Thomas Heneage, vice chamberlain of Queen Elizabeth’s household; but he died within a year, and in 1596 she took a third husband, Sir William Hervey, who distinguished himself in military service in Ireland and was created a peer as Lord Hervey by James I.

[376a]By kind permission of the Marquis of Salisbury I lately copied out this essay at Hatfield.

[376b]In 1588 his brother-in-law, Thomas Arundel, afterwards first Lord Arundel of Wardour (husband of his only sister, Mary), petitioned Lord Burghley to grant him an additional tract of the New Forest about his house at Beaulieu. Although in his ‘nonage,’ Arundel wrote, the Earl was by no means ‘of the smallest hope.’ Arundel, with almost prophetic insight, added that the Earl of Pembroke was Southampton’s ‘most feared rival’ in the competition for the land in question. Arundel was referring to the father of that third Earl of Pembroke who, despite the absence of evidence, has been described as Shakespeare’s friend of the sonnets (cf.Calendar of Hatfield MSS.iii. 365).

[377a]Cf.Apollinis et Musarum Ευκτικα Ειδυλλια, Oxford, 1592, reprinted inElizabethan Oxford(Oxford Historical Society), edited by Charles Plummer, xxix. 294:

Comes

South-

Hamp-

toniæ.

Post hunc (i.e.Earl of Essex) insequitur clarâ de stirpe DynastaIure suo diues quem South-Hamptonia magnumVendicat heroem; quo non formosior alterAffuit, ant doctâ iuuenis præstantior arte;Ora licet tenerâ vix dum lanugine vernent.

[377b]Historical MSS. Commission, 7th Report (Appendix) p. 521b.

[378]Peele’sAnglorum Feriæ.

[379]Cal. of the Duke of Rutland’s MSS.i. 321. Barnabe Barnes, who was one of Southampton’s poetic admirers, addressed a crude sonnet to ‘the Beautiful Lady, The Lady Bridget Manners,’ in 1593, at the same time as he addressed one to Southampton. Both are appended to Barnes’s collection of sonnets and other poems entitledParthenophe and Parthenophil(cf. Arber’sGarner, v. 486). Barnes apostrophises Lady Bridget as ‘fairest and sweetest’

Of all those sweet and fair flowers,The pride of chaste Cynthia’s [i.e.Queen Elizabeth’s] rich crown.

[380]See p. 233, note 2.

[383a]The original letter is at Hatfield. The whole is printed in Historical Manuscripts Commission, 3rd Rep. p. 145.

[383b]The quotation is a confused reminiscence of Falstaff’s remarks in IHenry IV. II. iv. The last nine words are an exact quotation of lines 190-1.

[383c]Sidney Papers, ii. 132.

[383d]See p. 175.

[385a]See Nash’sWorks, ed. Grosart, v. 6. The whole passage runs: ‘How wel or ill I haue done in it I am ignorant: (the eye that sees round about it selfe sees not into it selfe): only your Honours applauding encouragement hath power to make me arrogant. Incomprehensible is the height of your spirit both in heroical resolution and matters of conceit. Vnrepriuebly perisheth that booke whatsoeuer to wast paper, which on the diamond rocke of your judgement disasterly chanceth to be shipwrackt. A dere louer and cherisher you are, as well of the louers of Poets, as of Poets them selues. Amongst their sacred number I dare not ascribe my selfe, though now and then I speak English: that smal braine I haue, to no further vse I conuert saue to be kinde to my frends, and fatall to my enemies. A new brain, a new wit, a new stile, a new soule will I get mee to canonize your name to posteritie, if in this my first attempt I am not taxed of presumption. Of your gracious fauer I despaire not, for I am not altogether Fames out-cast . . . Your Lordship is the large spreading branch of renown, from whence these my idle leaues seeke to deriue their whole nourishing.’

[385b]The complimentary title of ‘Amyntas,’ which was naturalised in English literature by Abraham Fraunce’s two renderings of Tasso’sAminta—one direct from the Italian and the other from the Latin version of Thomas Watson—was apparently bestowed by Spenser on the Earl of Derby in hisColin Clouts come Home againe(1595); and some critics assume that Nash referred inPierce Pennilesseto that nobleman rather than to Southampton. But Nash’s comparison of his paragon to Ganymede suggests extreme youth, and Southampton was nineteen in 1592 while Derby was thirty-three. ‘Amyntas’ as a complimentary designation was widely used by the poets, and was not applied exclusively to any one patron of letters. It was bestowed on the poet Watson by Richard Barnfield and by other of Watson’s panegyrists.

[386]Two manuscript copies of the poem, which has not been printed, are extant—one among the Rawlinson poetical manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, and the other among the manuscripts in the Inner Temple Library (No. 538). Mr. John S. Farmer has kindly sent me transcripts of the opening and concluding dedicatory sonnets. The first, which is inscribed ‘to the right honorable the Lord S[outhampton]’ runs:

Pardon, sweete flower of matchles poetrye,And fairest bud the red rose euer bare,Although my muse, devorst from deeper care,Presents thee with a wanton Elegie.Ne blame my verse of loose unchastityeFor painting forth the things that hidden are,Since all men act what I in speeche declare,Onlie inducèd with varietie.Complaints and praises, every one can write,And passion out their pangs in statlie rimes;But of loues pleasures none did euer write,That have succeeded in theis latter times.Accept of it, deare Lord, in gentle parte,And better lines, ere long shall honor thee.

Accept of it, deare Lord, in gentle parte,And better lines, ere long shall honor thee.

The poem follows in about three hundred lines, and the manuscript ends with a second sonnet addressed by Nash to his patron:

Thus hath my penne presum’d to please my friend.Oh mightst thou lykewise please Apollo’s eye.No, Honor brookes no such impietie,Yet Ovid’s wanton muse did not offend.He is the fountaine whence my streames do flowe—Forgive me if I speak as I was taught;Alike to women, utter all I knowe,As longing to unlade so bad a fraught.My mynde once purg’d of such lascivious witt,With purifièd words and hallowed verse,Thy praises in large volumes shall rehearse.That better maie thy grauer view befitt.Meanwhile ytt rests, you smile at what I writeOr for attempting banish me your sight.Tho. Nash.

Tho. Nash.

[388a]Daniel’sCertaine Epistles, 1603: see Daniel’sWorks, ed. Grosart, i. 216 seq.

[388b]See Preface to Davies’sMicrocosmos, 1603 (Davies’sWorks, ed. Grosart, i. 14). At the end of Davies’sMicrocosmosthere is also a congratulatory sonnet addressed to Southampton on his liberation (ib.p. 96), beginning:

Welcome to shore, unhappy-happy Lord,From the deep seas of danger and distress.There like thou wast to be thrown overboardIn every storm of discontentedness.

[390]‘Amours of J. D.’ were doubtless sonnets by Sir John Davies, of which only a few have reached us. There is no ground for J. P. Collier’s suggestion that J. D. was a misprint for M. D.,i.e.Michael Drayton, who gave the first edition of his sonnets in 1594 the title ofAmours. That word was in France the common designation of collections of sonnets (cf. Drayton’sPoems, ed. Collier, Roxburghe Club, p. xxv).

[391]See note to p. 88supra.

[393a]The details of his career are drawn from Mr. Arber’sTranscript of the Registers of the Stationers’ Company.

[393b]Arber, ii. 124.

[393c]Ib.ii. 713.

[393d]A younger brother, Richard, was apprenticed to a stationer, Martin Ensor, for seven years from August 24, 1596, but he disappeared before gaining the freedom of the company, either dying young or seeking another occupation (cf. Arber’sTranscript, ii. 213).

[393e]Cf.Bibliographica, i. 474-98, where I have given an account of Blount’s professional career in a paper called ‘An Elizabethan Bookseller.’

[394a]Thorpe gives a sarcastic description of a typical patron, and amply attests the purely commercial relations ordinarily subsisting between dedicator and dedicatee. ‘When I bring you the book,’ he advises Blount, ‘take physic and keep state. Assign me a time by your man to come again. . . . Censure scornfully enough and somewhat like a traveller. Commend nothing lest you discredit your (that which you would seem to have) judgment. . . . One special virtue in our patrons of these days I have promised myself you shall fit excellently, which is to give nothing.’ Finally Thorpe, changing his tone, challenges his patron’s love ‘both in this and, I hope, many more succeeding offices.’

[394b]One gave an account of the East India Company’s fleet; the other reported a speech delivered by Richard Martin, M.P., to James I at Stamford Hill during the royal progress to London.

[395a]Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, 1635, p. 527.

[395b]Two bore his name on the title-page in 1603; one in 1604; two in 1605; two in 1606; two in 1607; three in 1608; one in 1609 (i.e.theSonnets); three in 1610 (i.e.Histrio-mastix,or the Playwright, as well as Healey’s translations); two in 1611; one in 1612; three in 1613; two in 1614; two in 1616; one in 1618; and finally one in 1624. The last was a new edition of George Chapman’sConspiracie and Tragedie of Charles Duke of Byron, which Thorpe first published in 1608.

[395c]They wereWits A.B.C. or a centurie of Epigrams(anon.), by R. West of Magdalen College, Oxford (a copy is in the Bodleian Library); Chapman’sByron, and Jonson’sMasques of Blackness and Beauty.

[395d]Chapman and Jonson were very voluminous authors, and their works were sought after by almost all the publishers of London, many of whom were successful in launching one or two with or without the author’s sanction. Thorpe seems to have taken particular care with Jonson’s books, but none of Jonson’s works fell into Thorpe’s hands before 1605 or after 1608, a minute fraction of Jonson’s literary life. It is significant that the author’s dedication—the one certain mark of publication with the author’s sanction—appears in only one of the three plays by Chapman that Thorpe issued, viz. inByron. One or two copies of Thorpe’s impression ofAll Foolshave a dedication by the author, but it is absent from most of them. No known copy of Thorpe’s edition of Chapman’sGentleman Usherhas any dedication.

[397]Many other instances of initials figuring in dedications under slightly different circumstances will occur to bibliographers, but all, on examination, point to the existence of a close intimacy between dedicator and dedicatee. R. S.’s [i.e.possibly Richard Stafford’s] ‘Epistle dedicatorie’ before hisHeraclitus(Oxford, 1609) was inscribed ‘to his much honoured father S. F. S.’An Apologie for Women,or an Opposition to Mr. D. G. his assertion. . .by W. H. of Ex. in Ox.(Oxford, 1609), was dedicated to ‘the honourable and right vertuous ladie, the Ladie M. H.’ This volume, published in the same year as Shakespeare’sSonnets, offers a pertinent example of the generous freedom with which initials were scattered over the preliminary pages of books of the day.

[398]In the volume of 1593 the words run: ‘To the noble and valorous gentleman Master Robert Dudley, enriched with all vertues of the minde and worthy of all honorable desert. Your most affectionate and devoted Michael Drayton.’

[399a]In 1610, in dedicatingSt. Augustine,Of the Citie of Godto the Earl of Pembroke, Thorpe awkwardly describes the subject-matter as ‘a desired citie sure in heaven,’ and assigns to ‘St. Augustine and his commentator Vives’ a ‘savour of the secular.’ In the same year, in dedicatingEpictetus his Manuallto Florio, he bombastically pronounces the book to be ‘the hand to philosophy; the instrument of instruments; as Nature greatest in the least; as Homer’sIliasin a nutshell; in lesse compasse more cunning.’ For other examples of Thorpe’s pretentious, half-educated and ungrammatical style, see p. 403, note 2.

[399b]The suggestion is often made that the only parallel to Thorpe’s salutation of happiness is met with in George Wither’sAbuses Whipt and Stript(London, 1613). There the dedicatory epistle is prefaced by the ironical salutation ‘To himselfe G. W. wisheth all happinesse.’ It is further asserted that Wither had probably Thorpe’s dedication to ‘Mr. W. H.’ in view when he wrote that satirical sentence. It will now be recognised that Wither aimed very gently at no identifiable book, but at a feature common to scores of books. Since hisAbuseswas printed by George Eld and sold by Francis Burton—the printer and publisher concerned in 1606 in the publication of ‘W. H.’s’ Southwell manuscript—there is a bare chance that Wither had in mind ‘W. H.’s’ greeting of Mathew Saunders, but fifty recently published volumes would have supplied him with similar hints.

[400a]Thorpe dedicated to FlorioEpictetus his Manuall,and Cebes his Table,out of Greek originall by Io. Healey, 1610. He dedicated to the Earl of PembrokeSt. Augustine,Of the Citie of God. . .Englished by I. H., 1610, and a second edition of Healey’sEpictetus, 1616.

[400b]Southwell’sFoure-fould Meditationof 1606 is a book of excessive rarity, only one complete printed copy having been met with in our time. A fragment of the only other printed copy known is now in the British Museum. The work was reprinted in 1895, chiefly from an early copy in manuscript, by Mr. Charles Edmonds, the accomplished bibliographer, who in a letter to theAthenæum, on November 1, 1873, suggested for the first time the identity of ‘W. H.,’ the dedicator of Southwell’s poem, with Thorpe’s ‘Mr. W. H.’

[401]A manuscript volume at Oscott College contains a contemporary copy of those poems by Southwell which ‘unfained affectionate W.H.’ first gave to the printing press. The owner of the Oscott volume, Peter Mowle or Moulde (as he indifferently spells his name), entered on the first page of the manuscript in his own handwriting an ‘epistel dedicatorie’ which he confined to the conventional greeting of happiness here and hereafter. The words ran: ‘To the right worshipfull Mr. Thomas Knevett Esquire, Peter Mowle wisheth the perpetuytie of true felysitie, the health of bodie and soule with continwance of worshipp in this worlde. And after Death the participation of Heavenlie happiness dewringe all worldes for ever.’

[403a]A bookseller (not a printer), William Holmes, who was in business for himself between 1590 and 1615, was the only other member of the Stationers’ Company bearing at the required dates the initials of ‘W. H.’ But he was ordinarily known by his full name, and there is no indication that he had either professional or private relations with Thorpe.

[403b]Most of his dedications are penned in a loose diction of pretentious bombast which it is difficult to interpret exactly. When dedicating in 1610—the year after the issue of theSonnets—Healey’sEpictetus his Manuall‘to a true fauorer of forward spirits, Maister John Florio,’ Thorpe writes of Epictetus’s work: ‘In all languages, ages, by all persons high prized, imbraced, yea inbosomed. It filles not the hand with leaues, but fills ye head with lessons: nor would bee held in hand but had by harte to boote. He is more senceless than a stocke that hath no good sence of this stoick.’ In the same year, when dedicating Healey’s translation of St. Augustine’sCitie of Godto the Earl of Pembroke, Thorpe clumsily refers to Pembroke’s patronage of Healey’s earlier efforts in translation thus: ‘He that against detraction beyond expectation, then found your sweete patronage in a matter of small moment without distrust or disturbance, in this work of more weight, as he approoued his more abilitie, so would not but expect your Honours more acceptance.’

[405]This is the sense allotted to the word in the great Variorum edition of 1821 by Malone’s disciple, James Boswell the younger, who, like his master, was a bibliographical expert of the highest authority. The fact that the eighteenth-century commentators—men like Malone and Steevens—who were thoroughly well versed in the literary history of the sixteenth century, should have failed to recognise any connection between ‘Mr. W. H.’ and Shakespeare’s personal history is in itself a very strong argument against the interpretation foisted on the dedication during the present century by writers who have no pretensions to be reckoned the equals of Malone and Steevens as literary archæologists.

[406]James Boaden, a journalist and the biographer of Kemble and Mrs. Siddons, was the first to suggest the Pembroke theory in a letter to theGentleman’s Magazinein 1832. A few months later Mr. James Heywood Bright wrote to the magazine claiming to have reached the same conclusion as early as 1819, although he had not published it. Boaden re-stated the Pembroke theory in a volume onShakespeare’s Sonnetswhich he published in 1837. C. Armitage Brown adopted it in 1838 in hisShakespeare’s Autobiographical Poems. The Rev. Joseph Hunter, who accepted the theory without qualification, significantly pointed out in hisNew Illustrations of Shakespearein 1845 (ii. 346) that it had not occurred to any of the writers in the great Variorum editions of Shakespeare, nor to critics so acute in matters of literary history as Malone or George Chalmers. The theory is treated as proved fact in many recent literary manuals. Of its supporters at the date of writing the most ardent is Mr. Thomas Tyler, who published an edition of the sonnets in 1890, and there further advanced a claim to identify the ‘dark lady’ of the sonnets with Mary Fitton, a lady of the Court and the Earl of Pembroke’s mistress. Mr. Tyler has endeavoured to substantiate both the Pembroke and the Fitton theories, by merely repeating his original arguments, in a pamphlet which appeared in April of this year under the title ofThe Herbert-Fitton Theory:a Reply[i.e.to criticisms of the theories by Lady Newdegate and by myself]. The Pembroke theory, whose adherents have dwindled of late, will henceforth be relegated, I trust, to the category of popular delusions.

[407]Cf.Sydney Papers, ed. Collins, i. 353. ‘My Lord (of Pembroke) himself withmy Lord Harbert(is) come up to see the Queen’ (Rowland Whyte to Sir Robert Sydney, October 8, 1591), and again p. 361 (November 16, 1595); and p. 372 (December 5, 1595). John Chamberlain wrote to Sir Dudley Carleton on August 1, 1599, ‘Young Lord Harbert, Sir Henrie Carie, and Sir William Woodhouse, are all in election at Court, who shall set the best legge foremost.’Chamberlain’s Letters(Camden Soc.), p. 57

[408]Thomas Sackville, the author of theInductiontoThe Mirror for Magistratesand other poetical pieces, and part author ofGorboduc, was born plain ‘Thomas Sackville,’ and was ordinarily addressed in youth as ‘Mr. Sackville.’ He wrote all his literary work while he bore that and no other designation. He subsequently abandoned literature for politics, and was knighted and created Lord Buckhurst. Very late in life, in 1604—at the age of sixty-eight—he became Earl of Dorset. A few of his youthful effusions, which bore his early signature, ‘M. [i.e.Mr.] Sackville,’ were reprinted with that signature unaltered in an encyclopædic anthology,England’s Parnassus, which was published, wholly independently of him, in 1600, after he had become Baron Buckhurst. About the same date he was similarly designated Thomas or Mr. Sackville in a reprint, unauthorised by him, of hisInductiontoThe Mirror for Magistrates, which was in the original text ascribed, with perfect correctness, to Thomas or Mr. Sackville. There is clearly no sort of parallel (as has been urged) between such an explicable, and not unwarrantable, metachronism and the misnaming of the Earl of Pembroke ‘Mr. W. H.’ As might be anticipated, persistent research affords no parallel for the latter irregularity.

[409]An examination of a copy of the book in the Bodleian—none is in the British Museum—shows that the dedication is signed J. H., and not, as Mr. Fleay infers, by Thorpe. Thorpe had no concern in this volume.

[410]On January 27, 1607-8, one Sir Henry Colte was indicted for slander in the Star Chamber for addressing a peer, Lord Morley, as ‘goodman Morley.’ A technical defect—the omission of the precise date of the alleged offence—in the bill of indictment led to a dismissal of the cause. SeeLes Reportes del Cases in Camera Stellata, 1593 to 1609, edited from the manuscript of Henry Hawarde by W. P. Baildon, F.S.A. (privately printed for Alfred Morrison), p. 348.

[411]See pp. 23, 231-2. A tradition has lately sprung up at Wilton to the effect that a letter once existed there in which the Countess of Pembroke bade her son the earl while he was in attendance on James I at Salisbury bring the King to Wilton to witness a performance ofAs You Like It. The countess is said to have added, ‘We have the man Shakespeare with us.’ No tangible evidence of the existence of the letter is forthcoming, and its tenor stamps it, if it exists, as an ignorant invention. The circumstances under which both King and players visited Wilton in 1603 are completely misrepresented. The Court temporarily occupied Wilton House, and Shakespeare and his comrades were ordered by the officers of the royal household to give a performance there in the same way as they would have been summoned to play before the King had he been at Whitehall. It is hardly necessary to add that the Countess of Pembroke’s mode of referring to literary men is well known: she treated them on terms of equality, and could not in any aberration of mind or temper have referred to Shakespeare as ‘the man Shakespeare.’ Similarly, the present Earl of Pembroke purchased of a London picture-dealer last year what purported to be a portrait of the third Earl of Pembroke, and on the back was pasted a paper, that was represented to date from the seventeenth century, containing some lines from Shakespeare’s Sonnet lxxxi. (9-14), subscribed with the words ‘Shakespeare unto the Earl of Pembroke, 1603’ The ink and handwriting are quite modern, and hardly make pretence to be of old date in the eyes of any one accustomed to study manuscripts. On May 5 of this year some persons interested in the matter, including myself, examined the portrait and the inscription, on the kind invitation of the present Earl, and the inscription was unanimously declared by palmographical experts to be a clumsy forgery unworthy of serious notice.

[414]Cf. the engravings of Simon Pass, Stent, and Vandervoerst, after the portrait by Mytens.

[415]It is unnecessary, after what has been said above (p. 123), to consider seriously the suggestion that the ‘dark lady’ of the sonnets was Mary Fitton, maid of honour to Queen Elizabeth. This frolicsome lady, who was at one time Pembroke’s mistress and bore him a child, has been introduced into a discussion of the sonnets only on the assumption that her lover, Pembroke, was the youth to whom the sonnets were addressed. Lady Newdegate’s recently publishedGossip from a Muniment Room, which furnishes for the first time a connected biography of Pembroke’s mistress, adequately disposes of any lingering hope that Shakespeare may have commemorated her in his black-complexioned heroine. Lady Newdegate states that two well-preserved portraits of Mary Fitton remain at Arbury, and that they reveal a lady of fair complexion with brown hair and grey eyes. Family history places the authenticity of the portraits beyond doubt, and the endeavour lately made by Mr. Tyler, the chief champion of the hopeless Fitton theory, to dispute their authenticity is satisfactorily met by Mr. C. O. Bridgeman in an appendix to the second edition of Lady Newdegate’s book. We also learn from Lady Newdegate’s volume that Miss Fitton, during her girlhood, was pestered by the attentions of a middle-aged admirer, a married friend of the family, Sir William Knollys. It has been lamely suggested by some of the supporters of the Pembroke theory that Sir William Knollys was one of the persons named Will who are alleged to be noticed as competitors with Shakespeare and the supposititious ‘Will Herbert’ for ‘the dark lady’s’ favours in the sonnets (cxxxv., cxxxvi., and perhaps clxiii.) But that is a shot wholly out of range. The wording of those sonnets, when it is thoroughly tested, proves beyond reasonable doubt that the poet was the only lover named Will who is represented as courting the disdainful lady of the sonnets, and that no reference whatever is made there to any other person of that Christian name.

[416]Professor Dowden (Sonnets, p. xxxv) writes: ‘It appears from the punning sonnets (cxxxv. and cxliii.) that the Christian name of Shakspere’s friend was the same as his own,Will,’ and thence is deduced the argument that the friend could only be identical with one who, like William Earl of Pembroke, bore that Christian name.

[418a]Ed. Mayor, p. 35.

[418b]Manningham’sDiary, p. 92; cf. Barnabe Barnes’sOdes Pastoralsestine 2:

‘But women will have their own wills,Alas, why then should I complain?’

[419]Besides punning words, printers of poetry in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries made an effort to italicise proper names, unfamiliar words, and words deemed worthy of special emphasis. But they did not strictly adhere to these rules, and, while they often failed to italicise the words that deserved italicisation, they freely italicised others that did not merit it. Capital initial letters were employed with like irregularity. Mr. Wyndham in his careful note on the typography of the quarto of 1609 (pp. 259 seq.) suggests that Elizabethan printers were not erratic in their uses of italics or capital letters, but an examination of a very large number of Elizabethan and Jacobean books has brought me to an exactly opposite conclusion.

[420]Barnes’sParthenophilin Arber’sGarner, v. 440.

[421a]After quibbling in Sonnet lxxii. on the resemblance between thegracesof his cruel mistress’s face and theGracesof classical mythology, Barnes develops the topic in the next sonnet after this manner (the italics are my own):

Why did rich Naturegracesgrant to thee,Since thou art such a niggard of thygrace?O how cangracesin thy body be?Where neither they nor pity find a place! . . .Grant me somegrace! For thou withgraceart wealthyAnd kindly may’st afford somegraciousthing.

Cf.Lear, IV. vi. 279, ‘O undistinguish’d space of woman’s will;’i.e.‘O boundless range of woman’s lust.’

[421c]Professor Dowden says ‘will to boot’ is a reference to the Christian name of Shakespeare’s friend, ‘William [? Mr. W. H.]’ (Sonnets, p. 236); but in my view the poet, in the second line of the sonnet, only seeks emphasis by repetition in accordance with no uncommon practice of his. The line ‘And will to boot, and will in over-plus,’ is paralleled in its general form and intention in such lines of other sonnets as

Kind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind (cv. 5).Beyond all date, even to eternity (cxxii. 4).Who art as black as hell, as dark as night (cxlvii. 14).

In all these instances the second half of the line merely repeats the first half with a slight intensification.

[422a]Cf. Barnes’s Sonnet lxxiii.:

All her looksgracious, yet nogracedo bringTo me, poor wretch! Yet be theGracesthere.

[422b]Shakespeare refers to the blindness, the ‘sightless view’ of the soul, in Sonnet xxvii., and apostrophises the soul as the ‘centre of his sinful earth’ in Sonnet cxlvi.

[423a]The use of the word ‘fulfil’ in this and the next line should be compared with Barnes’s introduction of the word in a like context in the passage given above:

Since what she lists her heartfulfils.

[423b]Mr. Tyler paraphrases these lines thus: ‘You love your other admirer named Will. Love the name alone, and then you love me, for my name is Will,’ p. 297. Professor Dowden, hardly more illuminating, says the lines mean: ‘Love only my name (something less than loving myself), and then thou lovest me, for my name is Will, and I myself am all will,i.e.all desire.’

[425]The word ‘Will’ is not here italicised in the original edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and there is no ground whatever for detecting in it any sort of pun. The line resembles Barnes’s line quoted above:

Mine heart bound martyr to thy wills.

[426]Because ‘will’ by what is almost certainly a typographical accident is here printedWillin the first edition of the sonnets, Professor Dowden is inclined to accept a reference to the supposititious friend Will, and to believe the poet to pray that the lady may have her Will,i.e.the friend ‘Will [? W. H.]’ This interpretation seems to introduce a needless complication.

[427a]See p. 83supra.

[427b]The word ‘sonnet’ was often irregularly used for ‘song’ or ‘poem.’ A proper sonnet in Clement Robinson’s poetical anthology,A Handefull of Pleasant Delites, 1584, is a lyric in ten four-line alternatively rhymed stanzas. Neither Barnabe Googe’sEglogs,Epyttaphes,and Sonnettes, 1563, nor George Turbervile’sEpitaphes,Epigrams,Songs and Sonets, 1567, contains a single fourteen-lined poem. The French word ‘quatorzain’ was the term almost as frequently applied as ‘sonnet’ to the fourteen-line stanza in regular sonnet form, which alone falls within my survey. Watson is congratulated on ‘scaling the skies in loftyquatorzains’ in verses before hisPassionate Centurie, 1582; cf. ‘crazed quatorzains’ in Thomas Nash’s preface to his edition of Sidney’sAstrophel and Stella, 1591; andAmours in Quatorzainson the title-page of the first edition of Drayton’sSonnets, 1594.

[428a]See p. 103supra.

[428b]All Watson’s sonnets are reprinted by Mr. Arber in Watson’sPoems, 1895.

[429a]In a preface to Newman’s first edition ofAstrophel and Stellathe editor, Thomas Nash, in a burst of exultation over what he deemed the surpassing merits of Sidney’s sonnets, exclaimed: ‘Put out your rushlights, you poets and rhymers! and bequeath your crazed quatorzains to the chandlers! for lo, here he cometh that hath broken your legs.’ But the effect of Sidney’s work was just the opposite to that which Nash anticipated. It gave the sonnet in England a vogue that it never enjoyed before or since.

[429b]With collections of sonnets of the first kind are occasionally interspersed sonnets of the second or third class, but I classify each sonnet-collection according to its predominant characteristic.

[429c]Daniel reprinted all but nine of the sonnets that had been unwarrantably appended to Sidney’sAstrophel. These nine he permanently dropped.

[431]It is reprinted in Arber’sGarner, ii. 225-64.

[432a]Arber’sGarner, v. 333-486.

[432b]Ben Jonson developed the same conceit in his masque,The Hue and Cry after Cupid, 1608.

[433a]Dekker’s well-known song, ‘Oh, sweet content,’ in his play of ‘Patient Grisselde’ (1599), echoes this sonnet of Barnes.

[433b]Arber’sGarner, viii. 413-52.

[433c]There is a convenient reprint of Lodge’sPhillis in Elizabethan Sonnet-Cyclesby Martha Foote Crow, 1896.

[435a]See p. 110, note.

[435b]Arber’sGarner, vi. 135-49.

[435c]Ib.v. 61-86.

[435d]Reprinted in Arber’sEnglish Scholars’ Library, 1882.

[435e]It was licensed for the press on November 19, 1594.

[436a]Reprinted for the Roxburghe Club inA Lamport Garland, 1881, edited by Mr. Charles Edmonds.

[436b]Sir John Davies’sComplete Poems, edited by Dr. Grosart, i. 52-62.

[436c]See p. 128, note.

[437a]Arber’sGarner, vii. 185-208.

[437b]Ib.v. 587-622.

[437c]Cf. Brydges’sExcerpta Tudoriana, 1814, i. 35-7. One was printed with some alterations in Rosseter’sBook of Ayres(1610), and another in theThird Book of Ayres(1617?); see Campion’s Works, ed. A. H. Bullen, pp. 15-16, 102.

[437d]Arber’sGarner, viii. 171-99.

[438a]See p. 390 and note.

[438b]Practically to the same category as these collections of sonnets belong the voluminous laments of lovers, in six, eight, or ten lined stanzas, which, though not in strict sonnet form, closely resemble in temper the sonnet-sequences. Such areWillobie’s Avisa, 1594;Alcilia:Philoparthen’s Loving Folly, by J. C., 1595;Arbor of Amorous Deuices, 1597 (containing two regular sonnets), by Nicholas Breton;Alba,the Months Minde of a Melancholy Lover, by Robert Tofte, 1598;Daiphantus,or the Passions of Love, by Anthony Scoloker, 1604; Breton’sThe Passionate Shepheard,or The Shepheardes Loue:set downe in passions to his Shepheardesse Aglaia:with many excellent conceited poems and pleasant sonets fit for young heads to passe away idle houres, 1604 (none of the ‘sonets’ are in sonnet metre); and John Reynolds’sDolarnys Primerose. . .wherein is expressed the liuely passions of Zeale and Loue, 1606. Though George Wither’s similar productions—his exquisitely fancifulFidelia(1617) and hisFaire-Virtue,the Mistresse of Phil’ Arete(1622)—were published at a later period, they were probably designed in the opening years of the seventeenth century.

[439a]They were first printed in 1656, seven years after the author’s death, inPoems by that famous wit,William Drummond, London, fol. The volume was edited by Edward Phillips, Milton’s nephew. The best modern edition is that edited by Mr W. C. Ward in the ‘Muses’ Library (1894).

[439b]Cf. William Browne’sPoemsin ‘Muses’ Library (1894), ii. 217 et seq.

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