A Life of William Shakespeare Part 6

Enthusiastic reception of the poems.

In these poems Shakespeare made his earliest appeal to the world of readers, and the reading public welcomed his addresses with unqualified enthusiasm. The London playgoer already knew Shakespeare's name as that of a promising actor and playwright, but his dramatic efforts had hitherto been consigned in ma.n.u.script, as soon as the theatrical representation ceased, to the coffers of their owner, the playhouse manager. His early plays brought him at the outset little reputation as a man of letters. It was not as the myriad-minded dramatist, but in the restricted role of adapter for English readers of familiar Ovidian fables, that he first impressed a wide circle of his contemporaries with the fact of his mighty genius. The perfect sweetness of the verse, and the poetical imagery in 'Venus and Adonis' and 'Lucrece' practically silenced censure of the licentious treatment of the themes on the part of the seriously minded. Critics vied with each other in the exuberance of the eulogies in which they proclaimed that the fortunate author had gained a place in permanence on the summit of Parna.s.sus. 'Lucrece,'

wrote Michael Drayton in his 'Legend of Matilda' (1594), was 'revived to live another age.' In 1595 William Clerke in his 'Polimanteia' gave 'all praise' to 'sweet Shakespeare' for his 'Lucrecia.' John Weever, in a sonnet addressed to 'honey-tongued Shakespeare' in his 'Epigramms'

(1595), eulogised the two poems as an unmatchable achievement, although he mentioned the plays 'Romeo' and 'Richard' and 'more whose names I know not.' Richard Carew at the same time cla.s.sed him with Marlowe as deserving the praises of an English Catullus. {79} Printers and publishers of the poems strained their resources to satisfy the demands of eager purchasers. No fewer than seven editions of 'Venus' appeared between 1594 and 1602; an eighth followed in 1617. 'Lucrece' achieved a fifth edition in the year of Shakespeare's death.

Shakespeare and Spenser.

There is a likelihood, too, that Spenser, the greatest of Shakespeare's poetic contemporaries, was first drawn by the poems into the ranks of Shakespeare's admirers. It is hardly doubtful that Spenser described Shakespeare in 'Colin Clouts come home againe' (completed in 1594), under the name of 'Aetion'--a familiar Greek proper name derived from [Greek text], an eagle:

And there, though last not least is Aetion; A gentler Shepheard may no where be found, Whose muse, full of high thought's invention, Doth, like himselfe, heroically sound.

The last line seems to allude to Shakespeare's surname. We may a.s.sume that the admiration was mutual. At any rate Shakespeare acknowledged acquaintance with Spenser's work in a plain reference to his 'Teares of the Muses' (1591) in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' (v. i. 52-3).

The thrice three Muses, mourning for the death Of learning, late deceased in beggary,

is stated to be the theme of one of the dramatic entertainments wherewith it is proposed to celebrate Theseus's marriage. In Spenser's 'Teares of the Muses' each of the Nine laments in turn her declining influence on the literary and dramatic effort of the age. Theseus dismisses the suggestion with the not inappropriate comment:

That is some satire keen and critical, Not sorting with a nuptial ceremony.

But there is no ground for a.s.suming that Spenser in the same poem referred figuratively to Shakespeare when he made Thalia deplore the recent death of 'our pleasant w.i.l.l.y.' {80} The name w.i.l.l.y was frequently used in contemporary literature as a term of familiarity without relation to the baptismal name of the person referred to. Sir Philip Sidney was addressed as 'w.i.l.l.y' by some of his elegists. A comic actor, 'dead of late' in a literal sense, was clearly intended by Spenser, and there is no reason to dispute the view of an early seventeenth-century commentator that Spenser was paying a tribute to the loss English comedy had lately sustained by the death of the comedian, Richard Tarleton. {81a} Similarly the 'gentle spirit' who is described by Spenser in a later stanza as sitting 'in idle cell' rather than turn his pen to base uses cannot be reasonably identified with Shakespeare. {81b}

Patrons at court.

Meanwhile Shakespeare was gaining personal esteem outside the circles of actors and men of letters. His genius and 'civil demeanour' of which Chettle wrote arrested the notice not only of Southampton but of other n.o.ble patrons of literature and the drama. His summons to act at Court with the most famous actors of the day at the Christmas of 1594 was possibly due in part to personal interest in himself. Elizabeth quickly showed him special favour. Until the end of her reign his plays were repeatedly acted in her presence. The revised version of 'Love's Labour's Lost' was given at Whitehall at Christmas 1597, and tradition credits the Queen with unconcealed enthusiasm for Falstaff, who came into being a little later. Under Elizabeth's successor he greatly strengthened his hold on royal favour, but Ben Jonson claimed that the Queen's appreciation equalled that of James I. When Jonson wrote in his elegy on Shakespeare of

Those flights upon the banks of Thames That so did take Eliza and our James,

he was mindful of many representations of Shakespeare's plays by the poet and his fellow-actors at the palaces of Whitehall, Richmond, or Greenwich during the last decade of Elizabeth's reign.

VII--THE SONNETS AND THEIR LITERARY HISTORY

The vogue of the Elizabethan sonnet.

It was doubtless to Shakespeare's personal relations with men and women of the Court that his sonnets owed their existence. In Italy and France, the practice of writing and circulating series of sonnets inscribed to great men and women flourished continuously throughout the sixteenth century. In England, until the last decade of that century, the vogue was intermittent. Wyatt and Surrey inaugurated sonnetteering in the English language under Henry VIII, and Thomas Watson devoted much energy to the pursuit when Shakespeare was a boy. But it was not until 1591, when Sir Philip Sidney's collection of sonnets ent.i.tled 'Astrophel and Stella' was first published, that the sonnet enjoyed in England any conspicuous or continuous favour. For the half-dozen years following the appearance of Sir Philip Sidney's volume the writing of sonnets, both singly and in connected sequences, engaged more literary activity in this country than it engaged at any period here or elsewhere. {83} Men and women of the cultivated Elizabethan n.o.bility encouraged poets to celebrate in single sonnets their virtues and graces, and under the same patronage there were produced mult.i.tudes of sonnet-sequences which more or less fancifully narrated, after the manner of Petrarch and his successors, the pleasures and pains of love. Between 1591 and 1597 no aspirant to poetic fame in the country failed to seek a patron's ears by a trial of skill on the popular poetic instrument, and Shakespeare, who habitually kept abreast of the currents of contemporary literary taste, applied himself to sonnetteering with all the force of his poetic genius when the fas.h.i.+on was at its height.

Shakespeare's first experiments.

Shakespeare had lightly experimented with the sonnet from the outset of his literary career. Three well-turned examples figure in 'Love's Labour's Lost,' probably his earliest play; two of the choruses in 'Romeo and Juliet' are couched in the sonnet form; and a letter of the heroine Helen, in 'All's Well that Ends Well,' which bears traces of very early composition, takes the same shape. It has, too, been argued ingeniously, if not convincingly, that he was author of the somewhat clumsy sonnet, 'Phaeton to his friend Florio,' which prefaced in 1591 Florio's 'Second Frutes,' a series of Italian-English dialogues for students. {84}

Majority of Shakespeare's sonnets composed in 1594.

But these were sporadic efforts. It was not till the spring of 1593, after Shakespeare had secured a n.o.bleman's patronage for his earliest publication, 'Venus and Adonis,' that he became a sonnetteer on an extended scale. Of the hundred and fifty-four sonnets that survive outside his plays, the greater number were in all likelihood composed between that date and the autumn of 1594, during his thirtieth and thirty-first years. His occasional reference in the sonnets to his growing age was a conventional device--traceable to Petrarch--of all sonnetteers of the day, and admits of no literal interpretation. {86} In matter and in manner the bulk of the poems suggest that they came from the pen of a man not much more than thirty. Doubtless he renewed his sonnetteering efforts occasionally and at irregular intervals during the nine years which elapsed between 1594 and the accession of James I in 1603. But to very few of the extant examples can a date later than 1594 be allotted with confidence. Sonnet cvii., in which plain reference is made to Queen Elizabeth's death, may be fairly regarded as a belated and a final act of homage on Shakespeare's part to the importunate vogue of the Elizabethan sonnet. All the evidence, whether internal or external, points to the conclusion that the sonnet exhausted such fascination as it exerted on Shakespeare before his dramatic genius attained its full height.

Their literary value.

In literary value Shakespeare's sonnets are notably unequal. Many reach levels of lyric melody and meditative energy that are hardly to be matched elsewhere in poetry. The best examples are charged with the mellowed sweetness of rhythm and metre, the depth of thought and feeling, the vividness of imagery and the stimulating fervour of expression which are the finest fruits of poetic power. On the other hand, many sink almost into inanity beneath the burden of quibbles and conceits. In both their excellences and their defects Shakespeare's sonnets betray near kins.h.i.+p to his early dramatic work, in which pa.s.sages of the highest poetic temper at times alternate with unimpressive displays of verbal jugglery. In phraseology the sonnets often closely resemble such early dramatic efforts as 'Love's Labour's Lost' and 'Romeo and Juliet.' There is far more concentration in the sonnets than in 'Venus and Adonis' or in 'Lucrece,' although occasional utterances of Shakespeare's Roman heroine show traces of the intensity that characterises the best of them. The superior and more evenly sustained energy of the sonnets is to be attributed, not to the accession of power that comes with increase of years, but to the innate principles of the poetic form, and to metrical exigencies, which impelled the sonnetteer to aim at a uniform condensation of thought and language.

Circulation in ma.n.u.script.

In accordance with a custom that was not uncommon, Shakespeare did not publish his sonnets; he circulated them in ma.n.u.script. {88} But their reputation grew, and public interest was aroused in them in spite of his unreadiness to give them publicity. A line from one of them:

Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds (xciv. 14), {89a}

was quoted in the play of 'Edward III,' which was probably written before 1595. Meres, writing in 1598, enthusiastically commends Shakespeare's 'sugred {89b} sonnets among his private friends,' and mentions them in close conjunction with his two narrative poems. William Jaggard piratically inserted in 1599 two of the most mature of the series (Nos.

cx.x.xviii. and cxliv.) in his 'Pa.s.sionate Pilgrim.'

Their piratical publication in 1609. 'A Lover's Complaint.'

At length, in 1609, the sonnets were surrept.i.tiously sent to press.

Thomas Thorpe, the moving spirit in the design of their publication, was a camp-follower of the regular publis.h.i.+ng army. He was professionally engaged in procuring for publication literary works which had been widely disseminated in written copies, and had thus pa.s.sed beyond their authors'

control; for the law then recognised no natural right in an author to the creations of his brain, and the full owner of a ma.n.u.script copy of any literary composition was ent.i.tled to reproduce it, or to treat it as he pleased, without reference to the author's wishes. Thorpe's career as a procurer of neglected 'copy' had begun well. He made, in 1600, his earliest hit by bringing to light Marlowe's translation of the 'First Book of Lucan.' On May 20, 1609, he obtained a license for the publication of 'Shakespeares Sonnets,' and this tradesman-like form of t.i.tle figured not only on the 'Stationers' Company's Registers,' but on the t.i.tle-page. Thorpe employed George Eld to print the ma.n.u.script, and two booksellers, William Aspley and John Wright, to distribute it to the public. On half the edition Aspley's name figured as that of the seller, and on the other half that of Wright. The book was issued in June, {90} and the owner of the 'copy' left the public under no misapprehension as to his share in the production by printing above his initials a dedicatory preface from his own pen. The appearance in a book of a dedication from the publisher's (instead of from the author's) pen was, unless the subst.i.tution was specifically accounted for on other grounds, an accepted sign that the author had no hand in the publication. Except in the case of his two narrative poems, which were published in 1593 and 1594 respectively, Shakespeare made no effort to publish any of his works, and uncomplainingly submitted to the wholesale piracies of his plays and the ascription to him of books by other hands. Such practices were encouraged by his pa.s.sive indifference and the contemporary condition of the law of copyright. He cannot be credited with any responsibility for the publication of Thorpe's collection of his sonnets in 1609. With characteristic insolence Thorpe took the added liberty of appending a previously unprinted poem of forty-nine seven-line stanzas (the metre of 'Lucrece') ent.i.tled 'A Lover's Complaint,' in which a girl laments her betrayal by a deceitful youth. The poem, in a gentle Spenserian vein, has no connection with the 'Sonnets.' If, as is possible, it be by Shakespeare, it must have been written in very early days.

Thomas Thorpe and 'Mr. W. H.'

A misunderstanding respecting Thorpe's preface and his part in the publication has led many critics into a serious misinterpretation of Shakespeare's poems. {91} Thorpe's dedication was couched in the bombastic language which was habitual to him. He advertised Shakespeare as 'our ever-living poet.' As the chief promoter of the undertaking, he called himself 'the well-wis.h.i.+ng adventurer in setting forth,' and in resonant phrase designated as the patron of the venture a partner in the speculation, 'Mr. W. H.' In the conventional dedicatory formula of the day he wished 'Mr. W. H.' 'all happiness' and 'eternity,' such eternity as Shakespeare in the text of the sonnets conventionally foretold for his own verse. When Thorpe was organising the issue of Marlowe's 'First Book of Lucan' in 1600, he sought the patronage of Edward Blount, a friend in the trade. 'W. H.' was doubtless in a like position. He is best identified with a stationer's a.s.sistant, William Hall, who was professionally engaged, like Thorpe, in procuring 'copy.' In 1606 'W.

H.' won a conspicuous success in that direction, and conducted his operations under cover of the familiar initials. In that year 'W. H.'

announced that he had procured a neglected ma.n.u.script poem--'A Foure-fould Meditation'--by the Jesuit Robert Southwell who had been executed in 1595, and he published it with a dedication (signed 'W. H.') vaunting his good fortune in meeting with such treasure-trove. When Thorpe dubbed 'Mr. W. H.,' with characteristic magniloquence, 'the onlie begetter [_i.e._ obtainer or procurer] of these ensuing sonnets,' he merely indicated that that personage was the first of the pirate-publisher fraternity to procure a ma.n.u.script of Shakespeare's sonnets and recommend its surrept.i.tious issue. In accordance with custom, Thorpe gave Hall's initials only, because he was an intimate a.s.sociate who was known by those initials to their common circle of friends. Hall was not a man of sufficiently wide public reputation to render it probable that the printing of his full name would excite additional interest in the book or attract buyers.

The common a.s.sumption that Thorpe in this boastful preface was covertly addressing, under the initials 'Mr. W. H.,' a young n.o.bleman, to whom the sonnets were originally addressed by Shakespeare, ignores the elementary principles of publis.h.i.+ng transactions of the day, and especially of those of the type to which Thorpe's efforts were confined. {93} There was nothing mysterious or fantastic, although from a modern point of view there was much that lacked principle, in Thorpe's methods of business.