A Life of William Shakespeare Part 11

It is in almost identical phrase that every pen in the spring of 1603 was felicitating the nation on the unexpected turn of events, by which Elizabeth's crown had pa.s.sed, without civil war, to the Scottish King, and thus the revolution that had been foretold as the inevitable consequence of Elizabeth's demise was happily averted. Cynthia (_i.e._ the moon) was the Queen's recognised poetic appellation. It is thus that she figures in the verse of Barnfield, Spenser, Fulke Greville, and Ralegh, and her elegists involuntarily followed the same fas.h.i.+on. 'Fair Cynthia's dead' sang one.

Luna's extinct; and now beholde the sunne Whose beames soake up the moysture of all teares,

wrote Henry Petowe in his 'A Fewe Aprill Drops Showered on the Hea.r.s.e of Dead Eliza,' 1603. There was hardly a verse-writer who mourned her loss that did not typify it, moreover, as the eclipse of a heavenly body. One poet a.s.serted that death 'veiled her glory in a cloud of night.' Another argued: 'Naught can eclipse her light, but that her star will s.h.i.+ne in darkest night.' A third varied the formula thus:

When winter had cast off her weed Our sun eclipsed did set. Oh! light most fair. {148a}

At the same time James was constantly said to have entered on his inheritance 'not with an olive branch in his hand, but with a whole forest of olives round about him, for he brought not peace to this kingdom alone' but to all Europe. {148b}

Allusions to Southampton's release from prison.

'The drops of this most balmy time,' in this same sonnet, cvii., is an echo of another current strain of fancy. James came to England in a springtide of rarely rivalled clemency, which was reckoned of the happiest augury. 'All things look fresh,' one poet sang, 'to greet his excellence.' 'The air, the seasons, and the earth' were represented as in sympathy with the general joy in 'this sweetest of all sweet springs.'

One source of grief alone was acknowledged: Southampton was still a prisoner in the Tower, 'supposed as forfeit to a confined doom.' All men, wrote Manningham, the diarist, on the day following the Queen's death, wished him at liberty. {149a} The wish was fulfilled quickly. On April 10, 1603, his prison gates were opened by 'a warrant from the king.' So bountiful a beginning of the new era, wrote John Chamberlain to Dudley Carleton two days later, 'raised all men's spirits . . . and the very poets with their idle pamphlets promised themselves' great things. {149b} Samuel Daniel and John Davies celebrated Southampton's release in buoyant verse. {149c} It is improbable that Shakespeare remained silent. 'My love looks fresh,' he wrote in the concluding lines of Sonnet cvii., and he repeated the conventional promise that he had so often made before, that his friend should live in his 'poor rhyme,' 'when tyrants' crests and tombs of bra.s.s are spent.' It is impossible to resist the inference that Shakespeare thus saluted his patron on the close of his days of tribulation. Shakespeare's genius had then won for him a public reputation that rendered him independent of any private patron's favour, and he made no further reference in his writings to the patronage that Southampton had extended to him in earlier years. But the terms in which he greeted his former protector for the last time in verse justify the belief that, during his remaining thirteen years of life, the poet cultivated friendly relations with the Earl of Southampton, and was mindful to the last of the encouragement that the young peer offered him while he was still on the threshold of the temple of fame.

X--THE SUPPOSED STORY OF INTRIGUE IN THE SONNETS

It is hardly possible to doubt that had Shakespeare, who was more prolific in invention than any other poet, poured out in his sonnets his personal pa.s.sions and emotions, he would have been carried by his imagination, at every stage, far beyond the beaten tracks of the conventional sonnetteers of his day. The imitative element in his sonnets is large enough to refute the a.s.sertion that in them as a whole he sought to 'unlock his heart.' It is likely enough that beneath all the conventional adulation bestowed by Shakespeare on Southampton there lay a genuine affection, but his sonnets to the Earl were no involuntary ebullitions of a devoted and disinterested friends.h.i.+p; they were celebrations of a patron's favour in the terminology--often raised by Shakespeare's genius to the loftiest heights of poetry--that was invariably consecrated to such a purpose by a current literary convention. Very few of Shakespeare's 'sugared sonnets' have a substantial right to be regarded as untutored cries of the soul. It is true that the sonnets in which the writer reproaches himself with sin, or gives expression to a sense of melancholy, offer at times a convincing illusion of autobiographic confessions; and it is just possible that they stand apart from the rest, and reveal the writer's inner consciousness, in which case they are not to be matched in any other of Shakespeare's literary compositions. But they may be, on the other hand, merely literary meditations, conceived by the greatest of dramatists, on infirmities incident to all human nature, and only attempted after the cue had been given by rival sonnetteers. At any rate, their energetic lines are often adapted from the less forcible and less coherent utterances of contemporary poets, and the themes are common to almost all Elizabethan collections of sonnets. {152} Shakespeare's n.o.ble sonnet on the ravages of l.u.s.t (cxxix.), for example, treats with marvellous force and insight a stereotyped theme of sonnetteers, and it may have owed its whole existence to Sir Philip Sidney's sonnet on 'Desire.' {153a}

The youth's relations with the poet's mistress.

Only in one group, composed of six sonnets scattered through the collection, is there traceable a strand of wholly original sentiment, not to be readily defined and boldly projecting from the web into which it is wrought. This series of six sonnets deals with a love adventure of no normal type. Sonnet cxliv. opens with the lines:

Two loves I have of comfort and despair Which like two angels do suggest (_i.e._ tempt) me still: The better angel is a man right fair, The worser spirit a woman colour'd ill. {153b}

The woman, the sonnetteer continues, has corrupted the man and has drawn him from his 'side.' Five other sonnets treat the same theme. In three addressed to the man (xl., xli., and xlii.) the poet mildly reproaches his youthful friend for having sought and won the favours of a woman whom he himself loved 'dearly,' but the trespa.s.s is forgiven on account of the friend's youth and beauty. In the two remaining sonnets Shakespeare addresses the woman (cx.x.xiii. and cx.x.xiv.), and he rebukes her for having enslaved not only himself but 'his next self'--his friend. Shakespeare, in his denunciation elsewhere of a mistress's disdain of his advances, a.s.signs her blindness, like all the professional sonnetteers, to no better defined cause than the perversity and depravity of womankind. In these six sonnets alone does he categorically a.s.sign his mistress's alienation to the fascinations of a dear friend or hint at such a cause for his mistress's infidelity. The definite element of intrigue that is developed here is not found anywhere else in the range of Elizabethan sonnet-literature. The character of the innovation and its treatment seem only capable of explanation by regarding the topic as a reflection of Shakespeare's personal experience. But how far he is sincere in his accounts of his sorrow in yielding his mistress to his friend in order to retain the friends.h.i.+p of the latter must be decided by each reader for himself. If all the words be taken literally, there is disclosed an act of self-sacrifice that it is difficult to parallel or explain. But it remains very doubtful if the affair does not rightly belong to the annals of gallantry. The sonnetteer's complacent condonation of the young man's offence chiefly suggests the deference that was essential to the maintenance by a dependent of peaceful relations with a self-willed and self-indulgent patron. Southampton's sportive and lascivious temperament might easily impel him to divert to himself the attention of an attractive woman by whom he saw that his poet was fascinated, and he was unlikely to tolerate any outspoken protest on the part of his _protege_.

There is no clue to the lady's ident.i.ty, and speculation on the topic is useless. She may have given Shakespeare hints for his pictures of the 'dark lady,' but he treats that lady's obduracy conventionally, and his vituperation of her sheds no light on the personal history of the mistress who left him for his friend.

'Willobie his Avisa.'

The emotions roused in Shakespeare by the episode, even if potent at the moment, were not likely to be deep-seated or enduring. And it is possible that a half-jesting reference, which would deprive Shakespeare's amorous adventure of serious import, was made to it by a literary comrade in a poem that was licensed for publication on September 3, 1594, and was published immediately under the t.i.tle of 'Willobie his Avisa, or the True Picture of a Modest Maid and of a Chaste and Constant Wife.' {155} In this volume, which mainly consists of seventy-two cantos in varying numbers of six-line stanzas, the chaste heroine, Avisa, holds converse--in the opening section as a maid, and in the later section as a wife--with a series of pa.s.sionate adorers. In every case she firmly repulses their advances. Midway through the book its alleged author--Henry Willobie--is introduced in his own person as an ardent admirer, and the last twenty-nine of the cantos rehea.r.s.e his woes and Avisa's obduracy. To this section there is prefixed an argument in prose (canto xliv.) It is there stated that Willobie, 'being suddenly affected with the contagion of a fantastical wit at the first sight of Avisa, pineth a while in secret grief. At length, not able any longer to endure the burning heat of so fervent a humour, [he] bewrayeth the secrecy of his disease unto his familiar friend _W. S._, _who not long before had tried the courtesy of the like pa.s.sion and was now newly recovered of the like infection_. Yet [W. S.], finding his friend let blood in the same vein, took pleasure for a time to see him bleed, and instead of stopping the issue, he enlargeth the wound with the sharp razor of willing conceit,' encouraging Willobie to believe that Avisa would ultimately yield 'with pains, diligence, and some cost in time.' 'The miserable comforter' [W. S.], the pa.s.sage continues, was moved to comfort his friend 'with an impossibility,' for one of two reasons. Either 'he now would secretly laugh at his friend's folly' because he 'had given occasion not long before unto others to laugh at his own.' Or 'he would see whether another could play his part better than himself, and, in viewing after the course of this loving comedy,' would 'see whether it would sort to a happier end for this new actor than it did for _the old player_. But at length this comedy was like to have grown to a tragedy by the weak and feeble estate that H. W. was brought unto,' owing to Avisa's unflinching rect.i.tude. Happily, 'time and necessity' effected a cure. In two succeeding cantos in verse W. S. is introduced in dialogue with Willobie, and he gives him, in _oratio recta_, light-hearted and mocking counsel which Willobie accepts with results disastrous to his mental health.

Ident.i.ty of initials, on which the theory of Shakespeare's ident.i.ty with H. W.'s unfeeling adviser mainly rests, is not a strong foundation, {157} and doubt is justifiable as to whether the story of 'Avisa' and her lovers is not fict.i.tious. In a preface signed Hadrian Dorell, the writer, after mentioning that the alleged author (Willobie) was dead, discusses somewhat enigmatically whether or no the work is 'a poetical fiction.' In a new edition of 1596 the same editor decides the question in the affirmative. But Dorell, while making this admission, leaves untouched the curious episode of 'W. S.' The mention of 'W. S.' as 'the old player,' and the employment of theatrical imagery in discussing his relations with Willobie, must be coupled with the fact that Shakespeare, at a date when mentions of him in print were rare, was eulogised by name as the author of 'Lucrece' in some prefatory verses to the volume. From such considerations the theory of 'W. S.'s' ident.i.ty with Willobie's acquaintance acquires substance. If we a.s.sume that it was Shakespeare who took a roguish delight in watching his friend Willobie suffer the disdain of 'chaste Avisa' because he had 'newly recovered' from the effects of a like experience, it is clear that the theft of Shakespeare's mistress by another friend did not cause him deep or lasting distress.

The allusions that were presumably made to the episode by the author of 'Avisa' bring it, in fact, nearer the confines of comedy than of tragedy.

Summary of conclusions respecting the sonnets.

The processes of construction which are discernible in Shakespeare's sonnets are thus seen to be identical with those that are discernible in the rest of his literary work. They present one more proof of his punctilious regard for the demands of public taste, and of his marvellous genius and skill in adapting and trans.m.u.ting for his own purposes the labours of other workers in the field that for the moment engaged his attention. Most of Shakespeare's sonnets were produced in 1594 under the incitement of that freakish rage for sonnetteering which, taking its rise in Italy and sweeping over France on its way to England, absorbed for some half-dozen years in this country a greater volume of literary energy than has been applied to sonnetteering within the same s.p.a.ce of time here or elsewhere before or since. The thousands of sonnets that were circulated in England between 1591 and 1597 were of every literary quality, from sublimity to inanity, and they ill.u.s.trated in form and topic every known phase of sonnetteering activity. Shakespeare's collection, which was put together at haphazard and published surrept.i.tiously many years after the poems were written, was a medley, at times reaching heights of literary excellence that none other scaled, but as a whole reflecting the varied features of the sonnetteering vogue.

Apostrophes to metaphysical abstractions, vivid picturings of the beauties of nature, adulation of a patron, idealisation of a _protege's_ regard for a n.o.bleman in the figurative language of amorous pa.s.sion, amiable compliments on a woman's hair or touch on the virginals, and vehement denunciation of the falseness and frailty of womankind--all appear as frequently in contemporary collections of sonnets as in Shakespeare's. He borrows very many of his compet.i.tors' words and thoughts, but he so fused them with his fancy as often to transfigure them. Genuine emotion or the writer's personal experience very rarely inspired the Elizabethan sonnet, and Shakespeare's sonnets proved no exception to the rule. A personal note may have escaped him involuntarily in the sonnets in which he gives voice to a sense of melancholy and self-remorse, but his dramatic instinct never slept, and there is no proof that he is doing more in those sonnets than produce dramatically the illusion of a personal confession. Only in one scattered series of six sonnets, where he introduced a topic, unknown to other sonnetteers, of a lover's supersession by his friend in a mistress's graces, does he seem to show independence of his comrades and draw directly on an incident in his own life, but even there the emotion is wanting in seriousness. The sole biographical inference deducible from the sonnets is that at one time in his career Shakespeare disdained no weapon of flattery in an endeavour to monopolise the bountiful patronage of a young man of rank. External evidence agrees with internal evidence in identifying the belauded patron with the Earl of Southampton, and the real value to a biographer of Shakespeare's sonnets is the corroboration they offer of the ancient tradition that the Earl of Southampton, to whom his two narrative poems were openly dedicated, gave Shakespeare at an early period of his literary career help and encouragement, which ent.i.tles the Earl to a place in the poet's biography resembling that filled by the Duke Alfonso d'Este in the biography of Ariosto, or like that filled by Margaret, d.u.c.h.ess of Savoy, in the biography of Ronsard.

XI--THE DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER

'Midsummer Night's Dream.'

But, all the while that Shakespeare was fancifully a.s.suring his patron

[How] to no other pa.s.s my verses tend Than of your graces and your gifts to tell,

his dramatic work was steadily advancing. To the winter season of 1595 probably belongs 'Midsummer Night's Dream.' {161} The comedy may well have been written to celebrate a marriage--perhaps the marriage of the universal patroness of poets, Lucy Harington, to Edward Russell, third earl of Bedford, on December 12, 1594; or that of William Stanley, earl of Derby, at Greenwich on January 24, 1594-5. The elaborate compliment to the Queen, 'a fair vestal throned by the west' (II. i. 157 _seq._), was at once an acknowledgment of past marks of royal favour and an invitation for their extension to the future. Oberon's fanciful description (II. ii. 148-68) of the spot where he saw the little western flower called 'Love-in-idleness' that he bids Puck fetch for him, has been interpreted as a reminiscence of one of the scenic pageants with which the Earl of Leicester entertained Queen Elizabeth on her visit to Kenilworth in 1575. {162} The whole play is in the airiest and most graceful vein of comedy. Hints for the story can be traced to a variety of sources--to Chaucer's 'Knight's Tale,' to Plutarch's 'Life of Theseus,' to Ovid's 'Metamorphoses' (bk. iv.), and to the story of Oberon, the fairy-king, in the French mediaeval romance of 'Huon of Bordeaux,' of which an English translation by Lord Berners was first printed in 1534. The influence of John Lyly is perceptible in the raillery in which both mortals and immortals indulge. In the humorous presentation of the play of 'Pyramus and Thisbe' by the 'rude mechanicals' of Athens, Shakespeare improved upon a theme which he had already employed in 'Love's Labour's Lost.' But the final scheme of the 'Midsummer Night's Dream' is of the author's freshest invention, and by endowing--practically for the first time in literature--the phantoms of the fairy world with a genuine and a sustained dramatic interest, Shakespeare may be said to have conquered a new realm for art.

'All's Well.'

More sombre topics engaged him in the comedy of 'All's Well that Ends Well,' which may be tentatively a.s.signed to 1595. Meres, writing three years later, attributed to Shakespeare a piece called 'Love's Labour's Won.' This t.i.tle, which is not otherwise known, may well be applied to 'All's Well.' 'The Taming of The Shrew,' which has also been identified with 'Love's Labour's Won,' has far slighter claim to the designation.

The plot of 'All's Well,' like that of 'Romeo and Juliet,' was drawn from Painter's 'Palace of Pleasure' (No. x.x.xviii.) The original source is Boccaccio's 'Decamerone' (giorn. iii. nov. 9). Shakespeare, after his wont, grafted on the touching story of Helena's love for the unworthy Bertram the comic characters of the braggart Parolles, the pompous Lafeu, and a clown (Lavache) less witty than his compeers. Another original creation, Bertram's mother, Countess of Roussillon, is a charming portrait of old age. In frequency of rhyme and other metrical characteristics the piece closely resembles 'The Two Gentlemen,' but the characterisation betrays far greater power, and there are fewer conceits or crudities of style. The pathetic element predominates. The heroine Helena, whose 'pangs of despised love' are expressed with touching tenderness, ranks with the greatest of Shakespeare's female creations.

'Taming of the Shrew.'

'The Taming of The Shrew'--which, like 'All's Well,' was first printed in the folio--was probably composed soon after the completion of that solemn comedy. It is a revision of an old play on lines somewhat differing from those which Shakespeare had followed previously. From 'The Taming of A Shrew,' a comedy first published in 1594, {163} Shakespeare drew the Induction and the scenes in which the hero Petruchio conquers Catherine the Shrew. He first infused into them the genuine spirit of comedy. But while following the old play in its general outlines, Shakespeare's revised version added an entirely new underplot--the story of Bianca and her lovers, which owes something to the 'Supposes' of George Gascoigne, an adaptation of Ariosto's comedy called 'I Suppositi.' Evidence of style--the liberal introduction of tags of Latin and the exceptional beat of the doggerel--makes it difficult to allot the Bianca scenes to Shakespeare; those scenes were probably due to a coadjutor.

Stratford allusions in the Induction.

The Induction to 'The Taming of The Shrew' has a direct bearing on Shakespeare's biography, for the poet admits into it a number of literal references to Stratford and his native county. Such personalities are rare in Shakespeare's plays, and can only be paralleled in two of slightly later date--the 'Second Part of Henry IV' and the 'Merry Wives of Windsor.' All these local allusions may well be attributed to such a renewal of Shakespeare's personal relations with the town, as is indicated by external facts in his history of the same period. In the Induction the tinker, Christopher Sly, describes himself as 'Old Sly's son of Burton Heath.' Burton Heath is Barton-on-the-Heath, the home of Shakespeare's aunt, Edmund Lambert's wife, and of her sons. The tinker in like vein confesses that he has run up a score with Marian Hacket, the fat alewife of Wincot. {164} The references to Wincot and the Hackets are singularly precise. The name of the maid of the inn is given as Cicely Hacket, and the alehouse is described in the stage direction as 'on a heath.'

Wincot.

Wincot was the familiar designation of three small Warwicks.h.i.+re villages, and a good claim has been set up on behalf of each to be the scene of Sly's drunken exploits. There is a very small hamlet named Wincot within four miles of Stratford now consisting of a single farmhouse which was once an Elizabethan mansion; it is situated on what was doubtless in Shakespeare's day, before the land there was enclosed, an open heath.

This Wincot forms part of the parish of Quinton, where, according to the parochial registers, a Hacket family resided in Shakespeare's day. On November 21, 1591, 'Sara Hacket, the daughter of Robert Hacket,' was baptised in Quinton church. {165} Yet by Warwicks.h.i.+re contemporaries the Wincot of 'The Taming of The Shrew' was unhesitatingly identified with Wilnecote, near Tamworth, on the Staffords.h.i.+re border of Warwicks.h.i.+re, at some distance from Stratford. That village, whose name was p.r.o.nounced 'Wincot,' was celebrated for its ale in the seventeenth century, a distinction which is not shown by contemporary evidence to have belonged to any place of like name. The Warwicks.h.i.+re poet, Sir Aston c.o.kain, within half a century of the production of Shakespeare's 'Taming of The Shrew,' addressed to 'Mr. Clement Fisher of Wincott' (a well-known resident at Wilnecote) verses which begin