[1]Hermann Conrad inPreussische Jahrbücher, February 1895. Under the pseudonym of Hermann Isaac inJahrbuch der Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, vol. xix. p. 176.
[1]Hermann Conrad inPreussische Jahrbücher, February 1895. Under the pseudonym of Hermann Isaac inJahrbuch der Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, vol. xix. p. 176.
[2]I do not find that Mr. G. A. Leigh has succeeded in identifying the rival poet with Tasso (Westminster Review, February 1897).
[2]I do not find that Mr. G. A. Leigh has succeeded in identifying the rival poet with Tasso (Westminster Review, February 1897).
In speaking ofLove's Labours Lost, I remarked that it was not difficult to distinguish the original text of the comedy from the portions added and altered during the revision of 1598; and I cited (p. 38) several instances in which the distinction was clear. Especial emphasis was laid on the fact that Biron's (or, as the context shows, Biron-Shakespeare's) rapturous panegyrics of love in the fourth act belong to the later date.
At another place (p. 83) it was pointed out that the two Rosalines ofLove's Labour's Lost(end of the third act) and ofRomeo and Juliet(ii. 4) were in all probability drawn from the same model, since she is in both places described as a blonde with black eyes. In the original text ofLove's Labour's Lost(Act iii.) she is expressly called—
"A whitely wanton with a velvet brow,With two pitch balls stuck in her face for eyes."
All the more surprising must it seem that during the revision the poet quite obviously had before his eyes another model, repeatedly described as "black," whose dark complexion indeed, so uncommon and un-English that it was apt to be thought ugly, is insisted upon as strongly as that of the "Dark Lady" in the Sonnets. Immediately before Biron bursts forth into his great hymn to Eros, in which Shakespeare so clearly makes him his mouthpiece, the King banters him as to the murky hue of the object of his adoration:—
"King. By heaven, thy love is black as ebony.Biron. Is ebony like her? O wood divine!A wife of such wood were felicity.O! who can give an oath? where is a book?That I may swear beauty doth beauty lack,If that she learn not of her eye to look:No face is fair, that is not full so black.King. O paradox! Black is the badge of hell,The hue of dungeons, and the scowl of night;And beauty's crest becomes the heavens well."
Biron's answer to this is highly remarkable; for it is exactly what Shakespeare himself says, in Sonnet cxxvii., to the advantage of his dark beauty:—
"Biron. Devils soonest tempt, resembling spirits of light.O! if in black my lady's brows be deck'd,It mourns, that painting, and usurping hair,Should ravish doters with a false aspect;And therefore is she born to make black fair.Her favour turns the fashion of the days;For native blood is counted painting now,And therefore red, that would avoid dispraise,Paints itself black, to imitate her brow."
The Sonnet runs thus:—
"In the old age black was not counted fair,Or if it were, it bore not beauty's name;But now is black beauty's successive heir,And beauty slander'd with a bastard shame;For since each hand hath put on nature's power,Fairing the foul with art's false borrow'd face,Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bower,But is profan'd, if not lives in disgrace.Therefore my mistress' eyes are raven black,Her eyes so suited, and they mourners seemAt such, who, not born fair, no beauty lack,Slandering creation with a false esteem:Yet so they mourn, becoming of their woe,That every tongue says, beauty should look so."
It appears, then, that the dark beauty inLove's Labour's Lostmust also have had a living model; and when we observe that the revision, as the title-page tells us, took place when the comedy was to be presented before her Highness at Christmas 1597, and further, that the dark Rosaline in the play is maid-of-honour to a princess who is called, in words strongly suggesting a passing compliment to the Queen, "a gracious moon"—we can scarcely avoid the conclusion that the beautiful brunette must have been one of the Queen's ladies, and that the whole end of the fourth act was addressed to her over the heads of the uninitiated spectators. Who she was, moreover, we can now conjecture with tolerable security. We know quite well which ofthe Queen's ladies brought Pembroke into disgrace, and we are no less certain that the lady who enthralled Pembroke was the black-eyed brunette whom Shakespeare, in his own words, loved to "distraction" and to "madding fever."
On the monument of Mary Fitton's mother in Gawsworth Church, in Cheshire, a highly coloured bust of Mary Fitton herself[1]led Tyler to assert that she must have been a marked brunette. It is true that the bust cannot give us a very accurate idea of her appearance in the year 1600, since it was executed in 1626, when she was forty-eight; but the complexion is dark, the high-piled hair and the large eyes black. That it does not suggest a beautiful original is a point in favour of its identity with the Dark Lady as described in Sonnet cxli.:—
"In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes,For they in thee a thousand errors note;But 'tis my heart that loves what they despise,Who in despite of view is pleas'd to dote.Nor are mine ears with thy tongue's tune delighted;Nor tender feeling to base touches prone,Nor taste, nor smell, desire to be invitedTo any sensual feast with thee alone:But my five wits nor my five senses canDissuade one foolish heart from serving thee,Who leaves unsway'd the likeness of a man,Thy proud heart's slave and vassal wretch to be:Only my plague thus far I count my gain,That she that makes me sin awards me pain."
The Rev. W. A. Harrison has discovered a family tree from which it appears that Mary Fitton, born June 24, 1578, became a maid-of-honour to Elizabeth in 1595, at the age of seventeen. Thus she was nineteen years old when, at the Court festivities of 1597, Shakespeare's company actedLove's Labour's Lost, with the panegyric of the dark beauty, Rosaline. She must have made the acquaintance of the poet and player, then thirty-three years old, at earlier Court entertainments. Who can doubt that it was she, with her high position and daring spirit, who made the first advances?
That the Dark Lady did not live with Shakespeare appears clearly enough in the Sonnets—for instance, in Sonnet cxliv. ("but being both from me"). It may be gathered from Sonnet cli., with the expressions "triumphant prize," "proud of this pride," that she was greatly his superior in rank and station, so that her conquest for some time filled him with a sense of triumph. Tyler even believes that there is an actual allusion to her name in Sonnet cli., which, as a whole, abounds in such daring equivoques as would be impossible in modern poetry.
It was thought surprising that in Sonnet clii., in which Shakespeare calls himself forsworn because he loves his lady although married to another, he also states expressly that she too is married, calling her "twice forsworn," since she has not only broken her "bed-vow," but broken her "new faith" to Shakespeare himself. It seemed difficult to reconcile this with the fact that Mrs. Fitton ("Mistress" in those days being applicable to unmarried no less than to married women) was always called by her father's name. She was married in 1607 to a certain William Polwheele, with whom she appears to have had a love-intrigue before the wedding. After the death of her husband she was married a second time to John Lougher.
However, it must now be pointed out that a work, published in 1897, which for the first time gave a trustworthy account of Mary Fitton's life, has rendered it excessively improbable that she should be identical with the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. The title of the work is:Gossip from a Muniment-Room, being Passages in the lives of Anne and Mary Fitton, 1574-1618; it is published by Lady Newdigate-Newdegate, who is married to a descendant of the elder sister, Anne Fitton, and it contains many interesting letters to this lady, with other communications from the family-archives. Here it is proved—in spite of Tyler's attempted contradiction—that the two well-preserved portraits of Mary Fitton at Arbury show that she was not dark at all, but had a light complexion, brown hair, and grey eyes.
From Mary Fitton herself there is only a brief note contained in the collection, but her name is often mentioned in the letters. They prove, that at the beginning of her career as maid-of-honour to the Queen, she had an admirer in the elderly court-functionary, Sir William Knollys, inspector of the household, who later, under King James, became a very potent personality as Lord Knollys; and it was evidently arranged between them that they would marry as soon as Sir William should become a widower. Their relations were not severed until the Pembroke scandal came out. Sir William married another lady after the death of his wife. This relation appeared to support the belief that Mary Fitton was Shakespeare's lady, as far as it gave a clue to the expressionthy bed vow broke, and in so far as Knollys' Christian name William seemed to explain the two first lines in Sonnet cxxxv.: You have your will (or William) and William (or will) a second time and William (or will) into the bargain. It had long been admitted that the two last of theseWillsreferred to Pembroke and Shakespeare. And it was suggested that a third Will was hidden in the first. In 1881 Dowden wrote: "As we know that the lady had a husband, it may be possible that he too bore the name of William." As against the unmistakable evidence of the portraits, however, it is impossible to attribute any weight to this circumstance. Moreover, the name of Shakespeare is never mentionedin the recently-published papers of the Fitton family. Of course the silence in itself is not conclusive. Mary Fitton may have known Shakespeare intimately without her relatives being aware of the fact. Besides, we know, from the dedication, which the clown of the Shakespearian troupe, the well known William Kemp, in 1600, addressed to her in his little book "Nine Daies Wonder," that she had certain relations with the company. This dedication runs as follows:Mistress Anne (supposed to be Mary) Fitton, Mayde of Honour of the most sacred Mayde Royal Queene Elisabeth.But I confess, that Mary's grey eyes decide the matter for me.
However, even if it be unreasonable to identify Mary Fitton with the Dark Lady of the Sonnets, after the publication of the Fitton family papers, this does not exclude the possibility that Pembroke may have been Shakespeare's rival. If Essex, as above mentioned, was obliged to acknowledge that he had had intrigues with four of the ladies of the court at the same time, Pembroke may well have had intimate relations with two of them at Once.
The Dark Lady must have been a woman in the extremest sense of the word, a daughter of Eve, alluring, ensnaring, greedy of conquest, mendacious and faithless, born to deal out rapture and torment with both hands, the very woman to set in vibration every chord in a poet's soul.
There can be no reasonable doubt that in the early days of his relation with the well-born mistress, Shakespeare felt himself a favourite of fortune, intoxicated with love and happiness, exalted above his station, honoured and enriched. She must at first have been to him what Maria Fiammetta, the natural daughter of a king, was to Boccaccio. She must have brought a breath from a higher world, an aroma of aristocratic womanhood, into his life. He must have admired her wit, her presence of mind and her daring, her capricious fancy and her quickness of retort. He must have studied, enjoyed, and adored in her—and that in the closest intimacy—the well-bred ease, the sportive coquetry, the security, elegance, and gaiety of the emancipated lady. Who can tell how much of her personality has been transferred to his brilliant young Beatrices and Rosalinds?
First and foremost he must have owed to her the rapture of feeling his vitality intensified—a main element in the happiness which, in the first years of their communion, finds expression in the sparkling love-comedies we have just reviewed. Let it not be objected that the Sonnets do not dwell upon this happiness. The Sonnets date from the period of storm and stress, when he had ascertained what at first, no doubt, he had but vaguely suspected, that his mistress had ensnared his friend; and in composing them he no doubt antedated many of the passionate and distracted unoods which overwhelmed him at the crisis, when he not onlyrealised the fact of their intrigue, but saw it dragged to the light of day. He then felt as though, doubly betrayed, he had irrevocably lost them both. Thus the picture of his mistress drawn in the Sonnets shows her, not as she appeared to him in earlier years, but as he saw her during this later period.
Yet he also depicts moments, and even hours, when his whole nature must have been lapped in tenderness and harmony. The scene, for instance, so melodiously portrayed in Sonnet cxxviii. is steeped in an atmosphere of happy love—the scene in which, seated at the virginals, the lady, whom the poet addresses as "my music," lets her delicate aristocratic fingers wander over the keys, enchanting with their concord the listener who longs to press her fingers and her lips to his. He envies the keys that "kiss the tender inward of her hand," and concludes:—
"Since saucy jacks so happy are in this,Give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss."
It is only natural, however, that the morbidly passionate, complaining, and accusing Sonnets should be in the majority.
Again and again he reverts to her faithlessness and laxity of conduct. In Sonnet cxxxvii. he speaks of his love as "anchored in the bay where all men ride." Sonnet cxxxviii. begins:—
"When my love swears that she is made of truth,I do believe her, though I know she lies."
And in Sonnet clii. he reproaches himself with having sworn a host of false oaths in swearing to her good qualities:—
"But why of two oaths' breach do I accuse thee,When I break twenty? I am perjur'd most;For all my vows are oaths but to misuse thee,And all my honest faith in thee is lost:For I have sworn deep oaths of thy deep kindness,Oaths of thy love, thy truth, thy constancy;And, to enlighten thee, gave eyes to blindness,Or made them swear against the thing they see."
In Sonnet cxxxix. he depicts her as carrying her thirst for admiration to such a pitch of wantonness that even in his presence she could not refrain from coquetting on every hand:—
"Tell me thou lov'st elsewhere; but in my sight,Dear heart, forbear to glance thine eye aside:What need'st thou wound with cunning, when thy mightIs more than my o'erpress'd defence can 'bide?"
She cruelly abuses her witchery over him. She is as tyrannical, he says in Sonnet cxxxi., "as those whose beauties proudly make them cruel," well-knowing that to his "dear-doting heart" she is "the finest and most precious jewel." There is actualmagic in the power she exerts over him. He does not understand it himself, and exclaims in Sonnet cl.:—
"Whence hast thou this becoming of things ill,That in the very refuse of thy deedsThere is such strength and warrantise of skill,That in my mind thy worst all best exceeds?"
No French poet of the eighteen-thirties, not even Musset himself self, has given more passionate utterance than Shakespeare to the fever and agony and distraction of love. See, for instance, Sonnet cxlvii.:—
"My love is as a fever, longing stillFor that which longer nurseth the disease:Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,The uncertain-sickly appetite to please.My reason, the physician to my love,Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,Hath left me, and I desperate now approveDesire is death, which physic did except.Past cure I am, now reason is past care,And frantic-mad with evermore unrest:My thoughts and my discourse as madmen's are,At random from the truth vainly express'd;For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,Who art as black as hell, as dark as night."
He depicts himself as a lover frenzied with passion. His eyes are dimmed with vigils and with tears. He no longer understands either himself or the world: "If that is fair whereon his false eyes dote, What means the world to say it is not so?" If it is not fair, then his love proves that a lover's eye is less trustworthy than that of the indifferent world (Sonnet cxlviii.).
And yet he well knows the seat of the witchery by which she holds him in thrall. It lies in the glow and expression of her exquisite "raven black" eyes (Sonnets cxxvii. and cxxxix.). He loves her soulful eyes, which, knowing the torments her disdain inflicts upon him—
"Have put on black, and loving mourners be,Looking with pretty ruth upon my pain."—Sonnet cxxxii.
Young as she is, her nature is all compounded of passion and will; she is ungovernable in her caprices, born for conquest and for self-surrender.
While we can guess that towards Shakespeare she made the first advances, we know that she did so in the case of his friend. In more than one sonnet she is expressly spoken of as "wooinghim."[2] In Sonnet cxliii. Shakespeare uses an image which, in all its homeliness, is exceedingly graphic:—
"Lo! as a careful housewife runs to catchOne of her feather'd creatures broke away,Sets down her babe, and makes all swift dispatchIn pursuit of the thing she would have stay;Whilst her neglected child holds her in chase,Cries to catch her whose busy care is bentTo follow that which flies before her face,Not prizing her poor infant's discontent:So runn'st thou after that which flies from thee,Whilst I, thy babe, chase thee afar behind;But if thou catch thy hope, turn back to me,And play the mother's part, kiss me, be kind:So will I pray that thou may'st have thyWill,If thou turn back, and my loud crying still."
The tenderness of feeling here apparent is characteristic of the poet's whole attitude of mind in this dual relation. Even when he cannot acquit his friend of all guilt, even when he mournfully upbraids him with having robbed the poor man of his one lamb, his chief concern is always lest any estrangement should arise between his friend and himself. See, for instance, the exquisitely melodious Sonnet xl.:—
"Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all:What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?No love, my love, that thou may'st true love call:All mine was thine before thou had'st this more.. . . . . . . . .I do forgive thy robbery, gentle thief,Although thou steal thee all my poverty."
The same tone of sentiment runs through the moving Sonnet xlii., which begins:—
"That thou hast her, it is not all my grief,And yet it may be said, I loved her dearly;That she hath thee, is of my wailing chief,A loss in love that touches me more nearly."
It closes with this somewhat vapid conceit:—
"But here's the joy: my friend and I are one;Sweet flattery! then she loves but me alone."
All these expressions, taken together, point not only to the enormous value which Shakespeare attached to the young Pembroke's friendship, but also to the sensual and spiritual attractionwhich, in spite of everything, his fickle mistress continued to possess for him.
It is not impossible that a passage in Ben Jonson'sBartholomew Fair(1614) may contain a satirical allusion to the relation portrayed in the Sonnets (published in 1609). In act v. sc. 3 there is presented a puppet-show setting forth "The ancient modern history of Hero and Leander, otherwise called the Touchstone of true Love, with as true a trial of Friendship between Damon and Pythias, two faithful friends o' the Bankside." Hero is "a wench o' the Bankside," and Leander swims across the Thames to her. Damon and Pythias meet at her lodging, and abuse each other most violently when they find that they have but one love, only to finish up as the best friends in the world.[2]
[1]Reproduced in Tyler'sShakespeare's Sonnets.
[1]Reproduced in Tyler'sShakespeare's Sonnets.
[2]"Damon. Whore-master in thy face;Thou hast lain with her thyself, I'll prove it in this place."Leatherhead. They are whore-masters both, sir, that's a plain case."Pythias. Thou lie like a rogue."Leatherhead. Do I lie like a rogue?"Pythias. A pimp and a scab."Leatherhead. A pimp and a scab!I say, between youyou have both but one drab."Pythias and Damon. Come, now we'll go together to breakfast to Hero."Leatherhead.Thus, gentles, you perceive without any denial'Twixt Damon and Pythias here friendship's true trial."
[2]
"Damon. Whore-master in thy face;Thou hast lain with her thyself, I'll prove it in this place."Leatherhead. They are whore-masters both, sir, that's a plain case."Pythias. Thou lie like a rogue."Leatherhead. Do I lie like a rogue?"Pythias. A pimp and a scab."Leatherhead. A pimp and a scab!I say, between youyou have both but one drab."Pythias and Damon. Come, now we'll go together to breakfast to Hero."Leatherhead.Thus, gentles, you perceive without any denial'Twixt Damon and Pythias here friendship's true trial."
The fact that the person to whom Shakespeare's Sonnets are dedicated is simply entitled "Mr. W. H." long served to divert attention from William Herbert, as it was thought that it would have been an impossible impertinence thus to address, without his title, a nobleman like the Earl of Pembroke. To us it is clear that this form of address was adopted precisely in order that Pembroke might not be exhibited to the great public as the hero of the conflict darkly adumbrated in the Sonnets. They were not, indeed, written quite without an eye to publication, as is proved by the poet's promises that they are to immortalise the memory of his friend's beauty. But it was not Shakespeare himself who gave them to the press, and bookseller Thorpe must have known very well that Lord Pembroke would not care to see himself unequivocally designated as the lover of the Dark Lady and the poet's favoured rival, especially as that dramatic episode of his youth ended in a manner which it can scarcely have been pleasant to recall.
A weighty work,A Life of Shakespeare, published in the year 1898, by Mr. Sidney Lee, has, however, thoroughly shaken the theories of those who held Pembroke to be the person to whom the Sonnets were dedicated, and the youth who inspired so many of them. Mr. Lee, who—rather arbitrarily—declines to attach any importance to the mention of Pembroke's name, and the appeal to his relations with Shakespeare in the folio edition, takes it for granted that Southampton was the one literary patron to whom Shakespeare expressed his gratitude, and he concludes that he alone is the hero of the Sonnets. As Mr. Lee supposes that most of them were written between the spring of 1593 and the autumn of 1594, Southampton would have been young enough to be mentioned as in the poems. As to the dedication of the Sonnets, Sidney Lee declares that it would have been an impossible breach of decorum to designate a man of such high rank and importance as Pembroke was in the year 1609 as "Mr. W. H." In his youthful days, even before he had a right to the title, he was always called Lord Herbert. In 1616 Thorpe dedicated a bookto him in these respectful, nay servile terms: To the right honourable William, Earle of Pembroke, Lord Chamberlaine to his Majestie, one of his most honorable Privie Counsell, and Knight of the Garter, etc.
Sidney Lee interprets the wordbegetteras procurer merely, and thinks that Thorpe, in the dedication, simply meant to express his gratitude to a man who had procured one of the manuscripts of the Sonnets, then circulating, and had given it to him. And as a dedication of the poems of the Jesuit Robert Southwell (of 1606), was signed with the letters W. H., indicating another pirate-editor, William Hall, Sidney Lee concludes that it was the latter, who three years later had laid hold of the manuscript of the Sonnets for Thorpe, and that Thorpe had accordingly placed his enterprise under his patronage. In a domain where all is obscure it is difficult to uphold a definite opinion in the face of an opponent so much more learned than myself. Yet I cannot but feel that there is in the wording of the dedication something quite incompatible with the idea that Thorpe addresses himself to a friend and colleague, and Sidney Lee meets this objection only with the remark that Thorpe was notably careless in the use of language. Besides, it is suggestive, that in the three existing dedications by Thorpe, other than that to W. H., the first is addressed to Florio, the two others to the Earl of Pembroke, consequently to real protectors of rank, while the one, which he nine years before addressed to the editor, Edward Blount, who published the manuscript of Marlowe's translation of Lucan for him, is drawn up in a very different and much more intimate way. It is addressed to his "kind and true friend," and gives the friend in question a few hints "as to how to fit himself" for this unaccustomed part of patron. The distance from this to the dedication of the Sonnets is great.
What Sidney Lee attempts to prove by his researches and conjectures is, that the man, who figures in the Sonnets as the protector of the poet, was Southampton, and not Pembroke. The name of the youth is not of the first importance, nor does it signify greatly whether the woman celebrated and attacked in the Sonnets bore the name of Mary Fitton or another. However, the main point is, that in common with a number of previous authors, who have thoroughly studied the contemporaneous literature of Europe, and more especially the sonnet-poetry of Italy, France and England, such as Delius and Elze in Germany, and Henrik Schück in Sweden, Lee, relying on the numerous traits that these poems share with other sonnet-cycles of their period, stamps the whole argument of the text as fiction, and denies their autobiographical character. Scarcely any writer before him has so boldly endeavoured to limit Shakespeare's originality in the domain of sonnet-poetry.
In the first place Lee points out, that the whole body ofsixteenth-century sonnets was so dependent firstly on Petrarch, then on such French writers as Ronsard, du Bellay and Desportes, that even the finest of them, the sonnets of Spenser, Sidney, Watson, Lodge, Drayton and Daniel may be characterised as imitative studies, if not simply as a mosaic of plagiarisms. Hereupon he tries to show Shakespeare's dependence on his predecessors. Shakespeare picked up, without scruple, ideas and expressions from the sonnets published by Daniel, Drayton, Watson, Barnabe Barnes, Constable and Sidney; he did this as deliberately and imperturbably as in his comedies he manipulated dramas and novels by contemporary and older poets. To Drayton especially is Shakespeare indebted. As all the Englishmen imitated the Frenchmen, Shakespeare has a false air of having been directly influenced by Ronsard, de Baif and Desportes, though he scarcely knew these poets in their own language.
The Danish translator of the Sonnets, Adolf Hansen, had already pointed out numerous impersonal traits. Some of the poorer Sonnets with their forced and complicated metaphors so obviously bear the impress of the spirit of the age, that it is quite impossible to regard them as characteristic of Shakespeare, and some few Sonnets are such complete imitations, that they cannot be accepted as confessions. Sonnets xviii. and xix. work out the same idea as Daniel's Delia, and Sonnets lv. and lxxxi. treat the very same subject as the sixty-ninth Sonnet in Spenser'sAmoretti. Finally the story of the friends, one of whom deprives the other of his mistress, is to be found in Lyly'sEuphues.
Sidney Lee maintains that when in Sonnets xxiv. and cxxii. Shakespeare propounds that the image of his friend is engraved in the depths of his heart, or that his brain is a better memorandum-book, as to the friend, than the book with which the latter has presented him, he is merely struggling with conceits of Ronsard's. When in Sonnets xliv, and xlv. he speaks about man as compounded of the elements, earth, air, fire and water, he appropriates motives from Spenser and Barnes. Sonnets xlvi. and xlvii., on the debate of the eye and the heart, are written in terms borrowed from the twentieth Sonnet in Watson'sTears of Fancy. Where he proclaims his assurance of the immortality of his verse, and the consequent eternity of his friend's fame, he does not speak from conviction, he only treats a motive, which, following the example of Pindar, Horace and Ovid, the Frenchmen Desportes and Ronsard, and after them such English sonneteers as Spenser, Drayton and Daniel had played upon. Not even when he writes that his lady is beautiful, though dark, and consequently unlovely, is he original; for Sidney had already used a similar phrase. And when he changes his mind, and in the dark eyes and dark complexion of his lady professes to read the blackness of her soul, he is even less original, for at that period the sonnet of invective was the standard variant of the sonnet ofamorous eulogy. Nothing is more common than to find the sonneteer grossly abusing his mistress. Ronsard called his a tigress, a murderess, a Medusa; Barnabe Barnes describes his as a tyrant, a Gorgon, a rock; the transition from tenderness to reproach was so frequent, that it was even parodied by Gabriel Harvey. Following many other critics Sidney Lee finally points out that no weight can be attached to the fact, that in Sonnets xxii., lxii., lxxiii., and cxxxviii., Shakespeare speaks of himself as old, for this, too, was a standing conceit of the sonnet-poets of that time. Daniel inDelia(23) when he was only twenty-nine speaks as if his life were finished. Richard Barnfield, only twenty years old, invites the boy Ganymedes to contemplate his silver hair, his wrinkled skin, the deep furrows of his face, all this in imitation of Petrarch.
Lee admits, however, that the group of Sonnets, most interesting to the reader, the most mature as to ideas and style, cannot be considered to date from the poet's thirtieth year; he even thinks that Shakespeare continued to write Sonnets until 1603, and propounds—regardless of the wording of the poem—that Sonnet cvii. was written in that year, on the occasion of the death of Queen Elizabeth. That the word "moon" here means Elizabeth is obvious. But that the expression
"The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured"
can mean the final eclipse of the moon is incredible. That the moon has passed through her eclipse, means, I take it, that she is shining brightly again, and thus the interpretation put forth above, of a hint at the frustrated conspiracy of Essex, is far more reasonable. But then this Sonnet, as well as those kindred to it in spirit and tone, point, not to the year 1603, but to 1601.
Yet here details are of minor importance. We take our stand on a fundamental conception of poetic production. All art, even that of the greater artists, begins with imitation; no poet avoids influences, and up to the present time no poet has hesitated to appropriate from predecessors all that might be of use to him. Even nowadays, when the appreciation of the duty of originality is so infinitely stronger than in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, it is easy to point out appropriations of foreign thoughts and turns of phrase among excellent poets, and it would be possible to enumerate a great variety of common traits among the lyrical poets of Europe. The range of subjects fit for lyrical poetry is not so very great, to be sure. As men, lyrists have after all many emotions and conditions in common. In the mode of expression alone—especially when ideas have to be expressed in an identical form of fourteen lines—is it possible for the poet to manifest his true originality.
No intelligent critic would think of looking to lyrical poems as to biographical sources, in the rough meaning of the term. The poetical is rarely identical with the personal ego. But onthe other hand it cannot be too strongly insisted upon that books (I mean great, inspired books, such as are read for hundreds of years) are never engendered by other books, but by life. Nobody, who has a drop of artist's blood in his veins, can imagine that a poet of the rank of Shakespeare can have written sonnets by the score only as exercises or metrical experiments, without any bearing on his life, its passions and its crises. The formula for good epic poetry is surely this: that it must always be founded on real life, even if rarely or never an exact copy of it. Lyrical poetry, in which the poet speaks in his own name, and especially of himself, must necessarily, if first-rate, be rooted in what the poet has felt so strongly that it has made him break into song.
The learned critics of Shakespeare's Sonnets regard them merely as metricaltours de force, penned in cold blood on subjects prescribed by fashion and convention. They look upon fancy as upon a spider, which spins chimera in all sorts of typical and artificial figures out of itself. It seems more natural to look upon it as a plant, extracting nourishment from the only soil in which it could thrive, namely, the observations and experiences of the poet.
The great modern poets, whose lives lie open before us, have betrayed to us how fancy springs out of impressions of real life, transforming them and making them unrecognisable by its mysterious workings. In several cases we are able to discern the dispersed elements, which in due time crystallise in the poem. Discerning criticism has opened our eyes to the intermixture of these elements in the magic caldron of fancy, while inferior criticism goes astray in a trivial search after possible models. In spite of German scholars and their exertions, we know nothing about whom Goethe had in his mind when he painted Clärchen, nor is this fact of any importance; but this is certain, that the whole poetical life-work of Goethe is founded upon experience. When Max Klinger one evening returned home from having seen a performance of Goethe'sFaust, he said: What most impressed me was that it was the life of Goethe.
As, knowing the life and experiences of the great modern poet, we are now generally able to trace how these are worked upon and transformed in his works, it is reasonable to suppose that in olden times poets were moved by the same causes, and acted in the same way, at least those of them who have been efficient. When we know of the adventures and emotions of the modern poet, and are able to trace them in the production of his free fancy; when it is possible, where they are unknown to us, to evolve the hidden personality of the poet, and—as every capable critic has experienced—to have our conjectures finally borne out by facts revealed by the contemporary author, then we cannot feel it to be impossible, that in the case of an older poet, we might also be successful in determining when he speaks earnestly from his heart, and in tracing his feelings and experiences through hisworks, especially when these are lyrical, and their mode of expression passionate and emotional.
Any one who holds fast to the by no means fantastic theory, that there is a certain connection between the life and the works of Shakespeare, will be but little moved by successive attempts to deny the Sonnets any autobiographical value, because of the conventional traits and frequent imitations to be pointed out in them.
The modern reader who takes up the Sonnets with no special knowledge of the Renaissance, its tone of feeling, its relation to Greek antiquity, its conventions and its poetic style, finds nothing in them more surprising than the language of love in which the poet addresses his young friend, the positively erotic passion for a masculine personality which here finds utterance. The friend is currently addressed as "my love." Sometimes it is stated in so many words that in the eyes of his admirer the friend combines the charms of man and woman; for instance, in Sonnet xx.:—
"A woman's face, with Nature's own hand painted,Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion."
This Sonnet ends with a playful lament that the friend had not been born of the opposite sex; yet such is the warmth of expression in other Sonnets that one very well understands how the critics of last century supposed them to be addressed to a woman.[1]
This tone, however, is a characteristic fashion of the age. And here, again, it has been insisted that love for a beautiful youth, which the study of Plato had presented to the men of the Renaissance in its most attractive light, was a standing theme among English poets of that age, who, moreover, as in Shakespeare's case, were wont to praise the beauty of their friend above that of their mistress. The woman, as in this case, often enters as a disturbing element into the relation. It was an accepted part of the convention that the poet as above noted should represent himself as withered and wrinkled, whatever his real age might be; Shakespeare does so again and again, though he was at most thirty-seven. Finally, it was quite in accordance with use and wont that the fair youth should be exhorted to marry, so that his beauty might not die with him. Shakespeare had already placed such exhortations in the mouth of the Goddess of Love inVenus and Adonis.
All this is true, and yet there is no reasonable ground for doubting that the Sonnets stand in pretty close relation to actual facts.
The age, indeed, determines the tone, the colouring, of the expressions in which friendship clothes itself. In Germany and Denmark, at the end of the eighteenth century, friendship was a sentimental enthusiasm, just as in England and Italy during the sixteenth century it took the form of platonic love. We can clearly discern, however, that the different methods of expression answered to corresponding shades of difference in the emotion itself. The men of the Renaissance gave themselves up to an adoration of friendship and of their friend which is now unknown, except in circles where a perverted sexuality prevails. Montaigne's friendship for Estienne de la Boétie, and Languet's passionate tenderness for the youthful Philip Sidney, are cases in point. The observations concerning friendship in Sir Thomas Browne'sReligio Medici, 1642 (pp. 98, 99), accord entirely with that of Shakespeare: "I love my friend more than myself, and yet I think that I do not love him enough. In a few months my manifold doubled passion will make me believe that I have not at all loved him before. When I am away from him, I am dead, until I meet him again. When I am together with him, I am not content, but always long for a closer connection with him. United souls are not contented, but wish for being truly identical with each other; and this being impossible, their yearnings are endless and must increase without any possibility of being gratified." But the most remarkable example of a frenzied friendship in Renaissance culture and poetry is undoubtedly to be found in Michael Angelo's letters and sonnets.
Michael Angelo's relation to Messer Tommaso de' Cavalieri presents the most interesting parallel to the attitude which Shakespeare adopted towards William Herbert. We find the same expressions of passionate love from the older to the younger man; but here it is still more unquestionably certain that we have not to do with mere poetical figures of speech, since the letters are not a whit less ardent and enthusiastic than the sonnets. The expressions in the sonnets are sometimes so warm that Michael Angelo's nephew, in his edition of them, altered the wordSignioreintoSignora, and these poems, like Shakespeare's, were for some time supposed to have been addressed to a woman.[2]
On January 1, 1533, Michael Angelo, then fifty-seven years old, writes from Florence to Tommaso de' Cavalieri, a youth of noble Roman family, who afterwards became his favourite pupil: "If I do not possess the art of navigating the sea of your potent genius, that genius will nevertheless excuse me, and neither despise my inequality, nor demand of me that which I have it not in me to give; since that which stands alone in everything can in nothing find its counterpart. Wherefore your lordship,the only light in our age vouchsafed to this worldshaving no equal or peer, cannot find satisfaction in the work of any other hand. If, therefore,this or that in the works which I hope and promise to execute should happen to please you, I should call that work, not good, but fortunate. And if I should ever feel assured that—as has been reported to me—I have given your lordship satisfaction in one thing or another, I will make a gift to you of my present and of all that the future may bring me; and it will be a great pain to me to be unable to recall the past, in order to serve you so much the longer, instead of having only the future, which cannot be long, since I am all too old. There is nothing more left for me to say. Read my heart and not my letter, for my pen cannot approach the expression of my good will."[3]
Cavalieri writes to Michael Angelo that he regards himself as born anew since he has come to know the Master; who replies, "I for my part should regard myself as not born, born dead, or deserted by heaven and earth, if your letters had not brought me the persuasion that your lordship accepts with favour certain of my works." And in a letter of the following summer to Sebastian del Piombo, he sends a greeting to Messer Tommaso, with the words: "I believeI should instantly fall down deadif he were no longer in my thoughts."[4]
Michael Angelo plays upon his friend's surname as Shakespeare plays upon his friend's Christian name. These are the last lines of the thirty-first sonnet:—
"Se vint' e pres' i' debb' esser beato,Meraviglia non è se, nud' e solo,Resto prigion d'unCavalierarmato.""If only chains and bands can make me blest,No marvel if alone and bare I goAn armed knight's captive and slave confessed."(J. A. Symonds.)
In other sonnets the tone is no less passionate than Shakespeare's —take, for example, the twenty-second:—
"More tenderly perchance than is my due,Your spirit sees into my heart, where riseThe flames of holy worship, nor deniesThe grace reserved for those who humbly sue.Oh blessed day when you at last are mine!Let time stand still, and let noon's chariot stay;Fixed be that moment on the dial of heaven!That I may clasp and keep, by grace divine—Clasp in these yearning arms and keep for ayeMy heart's loved lord to me desertless given."[5](J. A. Symonds.)
In comparison with Cavalieri, Michael Angelo could with justice call himself old. Some critics, on the other hand, have seen in the fact that Shakespeare was not really old at the time when the Sonnets were written, a proof of their conventional and unreal character. But this is to overlook the relativity of the term. As compared with a youth of eighteen, Shakespeare was in effect old, with his sixteen additional years and all his experience of life. And if we are right in assigning Sonnets lxiii. and lxxiii. to the year 1600 or 1601, Shakespeare had then reached the age of thirty-seven, an age at which (among his contemporaries) Drayton in hisIdeadwells quite in the same spirit upon the wrinkles of age in his face, and at which, as Tyler has very aptly pointed out, Byron in his swan-song uses expressions about himself which might have been copied from Shakespeare's seventy-third Sonnet. Shakespeare says:—
"That time of year thou mayst in me beholdWhenyellow leaves, or none, or few, do hangUpon those boughs which shake against the coldBare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang."
Byron thus expresses himself:—
"My days are inthe yellow leaf,[6]The flowers and fruits of love are gone,The worm, the canker and the griefAre mine alone."
In Shakespeare we read:—
"In me thou seestthe glowing of such fireThat on the ashes of his youth doth lieAs thedeath-bedwhereon it must expire,Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by."
Byron's words are:—
"The fire that on my bosom preysIs lone as some volcanic isle;No torch is kindled at its blaze—A funeral pile"
Thus both poets liken themselves, at this comparatively early age, to the wintry woods with their yellowing leaves, and without blossom, fruit, or the song of birds; and both compare the firewhich still glows in their soul to a solitary flame which finds no nourishment from without. The ashes of my youth become its death-bed, says Shakespeare. They are a funeral pile, says Byron.
Nor is it possible to conclude, as Schück does, from the conventional style of the first seventeen Sonnets—for instance, from their almost verbal identity with a passage in Sidney'sArcadia—that they are quite devoid of relation to the poet's own life.
In short, the elements of temporary fashion and convention which appear in the Sonnets in no way prove that they were not genuine expressions of the poet's actual feelings.
They lay bare to us a side of his character which does not appear in the plays. We see in him an emotional nature with a passionate bent towards self-surrender in love and idolatry, and with a corresponding, though less excessive, yearning to be loved.
We learn from the Sonnets to what a degree Shakespeare was oppressed and tormented by his sense of the contempt in which the actor's calling was held. The scorn of ancient Rome for the mountebank, the horror of ancient Judea for whoever disguised himself in the garments of the other sex, and finally the age-old hatred of Christianity for theatres and all the temptations that follow in their train—all these habits of thought had been handed down from generation to generation, and, as Puritanism grew in strength and gained the upper hand, had begotten a contemptuous tone of public opinion under which so sensitive a nature as Shakespeare's could not but suffer keenly. He was not regarded as a poet who now and then acted, but as an actor who now and then wrote plays. It was a pain to him to feel that he belonged to a caste which had no civic status. Hence his complaint, in Sonnet xxix., of being "in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes." Hence, in Sonnet xxxvi., his assurance to his friend that he will not obtrude on others the fact of their friendship:—
"I may not evermore acknowledge thee,Lest my bewailèd guilt should do thee shame:Nor thou with public kindness honour me,Unless thou take that honour from thy name:But do not so; I love thee in such sort,As, thou being mine, mine is thy good report."
The bitter complaint in Sonnet lxxii. seems rather to refer to the writer's situation as a dramatist:—
"For I am shamed by that which I bring forth,And so should you, to love things nothing worth."
The melancholy which fills Sonnet cx. is occasioned by the writer's profession and his nature as a poet and artist:—
"Alas! 'tis true, I have gone here and there,And made myself a motley to the view;Gor'd mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,Made old offences of affections new:Most true it is, that I have look'd on truthAskance and strangely; but, by all above,These blenches gave my heart another youth,And worse essays prov'd thee my best of love."
Hence, finally, his reproach to Fortune, in Sonnet cxi., that she did not "better for his life provide Than public means which public manners breeds":—
"Thence comes it that my name receives a brand;And almost thence my nature is subdu'dTo what it works in, like the dyer's hand."
We must bear in mind this continual writhing under the prejudice against his calling and his art, and this indignation at the injustice of the attitude adopted towards them by a great part of the middle classes, if we would understand the high pressure of Shakespeare's feelings towards the noble youth who had approached him full of the art-loving traditions of the aristocracy, and the burning enthusiasm of the young for intellectual superiority. William Herbert, with his beauty and his personal charm, must have come to him like a very angel of light, a messenger from a higher world than that in which his lot was cast. He was a living witness to the fact that Shakespeare was not condemned to seek the applause of the multitude alone, but could win the favour of the noblest in the land, and was not excluded from a deep and almost passionate friendship which placed him on an equal footing with the bearer of an ancient name. Pembroke's great beauty no doubt made a deep impression upon the beauty-lover in Shakespeare's soul. It is very probable, too, that the young aristocrat, according to the fashion of the times, made the poet his debtor for solider benefactions than mere friendship; and Shakespeare must thus have felt doubly painful the situation in which he was placed by the intrigue between his mistress and his friend.[7].
In any case, the affection with which Pembroke inspired Shakespeare—the passionate attachment, leading even to jealousy of other poets admired by the young nobleman—had not only a vividness, but an erotic fervour such as we never find in our century manifested between man and man. Note such an expression as this in Sonnet cx.:—
"Then give me welcome, next my heaven the best,Even to thy pure and most most loving breast."
This exactly corresponds to Michael Angelo's recently-quoted desire to "clasp in his yearning arms his heart's loved lord." Or observe such a line as this in Sonnet lxxv.:—
"So are you to my thoughts as food to life."
We have here an exact counterpart to the following expressions in a letter from Michael Angelo to Cavalieri, dated July 1533: "I would far rather forget the food on which I live, which wretchedly sustains the body alone, than your name, which sustains both body and soul, filling both with such happiness that I can feel neither care nor fear of death while I have it in my memory."[8]
The passionate fervour of this friendship on the Platonic model is accompanied in Shakespeare, as in Michael Angelo, by a submissiveness on the part of the elder friend towards the younger, which, in these two supreme geniuses, affects the modern reader painfully. Each had put off every shred of pride in relation to his idolised young friend. How strange it seems to find Shakespeare calling himself young Herbert's "slave," and assuring him that his time, more precious than that of any other man then living, is of no value, so that his friend may let him wait or summon him to his side as his caprice and fancy dictate. In Sonnet lviii. he speaks of "that God who made me first your slave." Sonnet lvii. runs thus:—
"Beingyour slave, what should I do but tendUpon the hours and times of your desire?I have no precious time at all to spend,Nor services to do, till you require.Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour,Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you,Nor think the bitterness of absence sour,When you have bid your servant once adieu;Nor dare I question with my jealous thought,Where you may be, or your affairs suppose;But, like a sad slave, stay and think of nought,Save, where you are how happy you make those."
Just as Michael Angelo spoke to Cavalieri of his works as though they were scarcely worth his friend's notice, so does Shakespeare sometimes speak of his verses. In Sonnet xxxii. he begs his friends to "re-survey" them when he is dead:—
"And though they be outstripp'd by every pen,Reserve them for my love, not for their rhyme,Exceeded by the height of happier men."
This humility becomes quite despicable when a breach is threatened between the friends. Shakespeare then repeatedlypromises so to blacken himself that his friend shall reap, not shame, but honour, from his faithlessness. In Sonnet lxxxviii.:—
"With mine own weakness being best acquainted,Upon thy part I can set down a storyOf faults concealed wherein I am attainted,That thou, in losing me, shalt win much glory."
Sonnet lxxxix. is still more strongly worded:—
"Thou canst not, love, disgrace me half so ill,To set a form upon desirèd change,As I'll myself disgrace: knowing thy will,I will acquaintance strangle, and look strange;Be absent from thy walks; and in my tongueThy sweet-belovèd name no more shall dwell,Lest I (too much profane) should do it wrong,And haply of our old acquaintance tell.For thee, against myself I'll vow debate,For I must ne'er love him whom thou dost hate."
We are positively surprised when, in a single passage, in Sonnet lxii., we come upon a forcible expression of self-love; but it does not extend beyond the first half of the Sonnet; in the second half this self-love is already regarded as a sin, and Shakespeare humbly effaces himself before his friend. All the more gladly does the reader welcome the few Sonnets (lv. and lxxxi.) in which the poet confidently predicts the immortality of these his utterances. It is true that Shakespeare is here greatly influenced by antiquity and by the fashion of his age; and it is simply as records of his friend's beauty and amiability that his verses are to be preserved through all ages to come. But no poet without a sound and vigorous self-confidence could have written either these lines in Sonnet lv.:—
"Not marble, nor the gilded monumentsOf princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme"—
or these others in Sonnet lxxxi.:—
"Your monument shall be my gentle verse,Which eyes not yet created shall o'erread;And tongues to be your being shall rehearse,When all the breathers of this world are dead."
Yet, as we see, the first and last thought is always that of the friend, his beauty, worth, and fame. And as he will live in the future, so he has lived in the past. Shakespeare cannot conceive existence without him. In Sonnets which have no direct connection with each other (lix., cvi., cxxiii.) he returns again and again to that strange thought of a perpetual cycle or recurrence of events, which runs through the whole of the world's history, from the Pythagoreans and Kohélet to Friedrich Nietzsche. Inview of such high-pitched idolatry, we can well understand that the friend's faithlessness, or, if you will, the mistress's conquest of the friend, and the sudden severance of the bond in 1601, must have made a deep impression upon Shakespeare's sensitive soul. The catastrophe left its mark upon him for many a long day.
And at the same time another and purely personal mortification was added to his troubles. Shakespeare's name was just then involved in a degrading scandal of one sort or another. He says so expressly in Sonnet cxii.:—
"Your love and pity doth the impression fillWhich vulgar scandal stamped upon my brow."
He here avers that he cares very little "to know his shames or praises" from the tongues of others, and that his friend's judgment is all in all to him; but in Sonnet cxxi., where he goes more closely into the matter, he confesses that some "frailty" in him has given rise to these malignant rumours, and we see that for this frailty his "sportive blood" was to blame. He does not deny the accusation, but asks—
"Why should others' false adulterate eyesGive salutation to my sportive blood?Or on my frailties why are frailer spies,Which in their wills count bad what I think good?"
The details of this scandal are unknown to us. We can only conclude that it referred to Shakespeare's alleged relation to some woman, or implication in some amorous adventure. In discussing this point, Tyler has aptly cited two passages in contemporary writings, though of course without absolutely proving that they have any bearing on the matter. The first is the above-quoted anecdote in John Manningham's Diary for March 13, 1601 (New Style, 1602), as to Shakespeare's forestalling Burbadge in the graces of a citizen's wife, and announcing himself as "William the Conqueror "—an anecdote which seems to have been widely current at the time, and no doubt arose from more or less recent events. The second passage occurs inThe Returne from Pernassus, dating from December 1601, in which (iv. 3) Burbadge and Kemp are introduced, and these words are placed in the mouth of Kemp: "O thatBen Ionsonis a pestilent fellow, he brought vpHoracegiuing the Poets a pill, but our fellowShakespearehath giuen him a purge that made him beray his credit." The allusion is evidently to the feud between Ben Jonson on the one hand and Marston and Dekker on the other, which culminated in 1601 with the appearance of Ben Jonson'sPoetaster, in which Horace serves as the poet's mouthpiece. Dekker and Marston retorted in the same year withSatiromastix, or the Untrussing of the Humorous Poet. As Shakespeare took no direct part in this quarrel, we can only conjecture what is meant by the aboveallusion. Mr. Richard Simpson has suggested that King William Rufus, in whose reign the action ofSatiromastixtakes place, and who "presides over the untrussing of the humorous poet," may be intended for William Shakespeare. Rufus, in the play, is by no means a model of chastity, and carries off Walter Terrill's bride very much as "William the Conqueror" in Manningham's anecdote carries off "Richard the Third's" mistress. Simpson thinks it probable that the spectators would have little difficulty in recognising the William the Conqueror of the anecdote in the William Rufus of the play, whose nickname, indeed, might be taken as referring to Shakespeare's complexion. If we accept this interpretation, we find inSatiromastixa further proof of the notoriety of the anecdote. Whether it be this scandal or another of the same kind to which the Sonnets refer, Shakespeare seems to have taken greatly to heart the besmirching of his name.
It remains that we should glance at the form of the Sonnets and say a word as to their poetic value.
As regards the form, the first and most obvious remark is that, in spite of their name, these poems are not in reality sonnets at all, and have, indeed, nothing in common with the sonnet except their fourteen lines. In the structure of his so-called Sonnets Shakespeare simply followed the tradition and convention of his country.
Sir Thomas Wyatt, the leading figure in the earlier English school of lyrists, travelled in Italy in the year 1527, familiarised himself with the forms and style of Italian poetry, and introduced the sonnet into English literature. A somewhat younger poet, Henry, Earl of Surrey, soon followed in his footsteps; he, too, travelled in Italy, and cultivated the same poetic models. Not until after the death of both poets were their sonnets published in the collection known asTottel's Miscellany(1557). Neither of the poets succeeded in keeping to the Petrarchan model—an octave and a sestett. Wyatt, it is true, usually preserves the octave, but breaks up the sestett and finishes with a couplet. Surrey departs still more widely from his model's strict and difficult form: his "Sonnet" consists, like Shakespeare's after him, of three quatrains and a couplet, the rhymes of which are in nowise interwoven. Sidney, again, preserved the octave, but broke up the sestett. Spenser attempted a new rhyme-scheme, interweaving the second and third quatrain, but keeping to the final couplet. Daniel, who is Shakespeare's immediate predecessor and master, returns to Surrey's really formless form. The chief defect in Shakespeare's Sonnets as a metrical whole consists in the appended couplet, which hardly ever keeps up to the level of the beginning, hardly ever presents any picture to the eye, but is, as a rule, merely reflective, and often brings the burst of feeling which animates the poem to a feeble, or at any rate more rhetorical than poetic, issue.
In actual poetic value the Sonnets are extremely uneven. The first group as we have already pointed out (p. 270) stands lowest in the scale, necessarily expressing but little of the poet's personal feeling.
The last two Sonnets in the collection (cliii. and cliv.), dealing with a conventional theme borrowed from the antique, are likewise entirely impersonal. W. Hertzberg, having been put on the track by Herr von Friesen, in 1878 discovered the Greek original of these two Sonnets in the ninth book of the Palatine Anthology.[9]. The poem which Shakespeare has adapted, and in Sonnet cliv. almost translated, was written by the Byzantine scholar Marianus, probably in the fifth century after Christ; it was published in Latin, among other epigrams, at Basle in 1529, was retranslated several times before the end of the sixteenth century, and must have become known to Shakespeare in one or other of these different forms.
Next in order stand the Sonnets of merely conventional inspiration, those in which the eye and heart go to law with each other, or in which the poet plays upon his own name and his friend's. These cannot possibly claim any high poetic value.
But the poems thus set apart form but a small minority of the collection. In all the others the waves of feeling run high, and it may be said in general that the deeper the sentiment and the stronger the emotion they express, the more admirable is their force of diction and their marvellous melody. There are Sonnets whose musical quality is unsurpassed by any of the songs introduced into the plays, or even by the most famous and beautiful speeches in the plays themselves. The free and lax form he had adopted was of evident advantage to Shakespeare. The triple and quadruple rhymes, which in Italian involve scarcely any difficulty or constraint, would have proved very hampering in English. As a matter of fact, Shakespeare has been able to follow out every inspiration unimpeded by the shackles of an elaborate rhyme-scheme, and has achieved a rare combination of terseness and harmony in the expression of sorrow, melancholy, anguish, and resignation. Nothing can be more melodious than the opening of Sonnet xl., quoted above, or these lines from Sonnet lxxxvi.:—