A Life of William Shakespeare Part 9

In France Etienne Jodelle, a professional sonnetteer although he is best known as a dramatist, made late in the second half of the sixteenth century an independent endeavour of like kind to stifle by means of parody the vogue of the vituperative sonnet. Jodelle designed a collection of three hundred sonnets which he inscribed to 'hate of a woman,' and he appropriately ent.i.tled them 'Contr' Amours' in distinction from 'Amours,' the term applied to sonnets in the honeyed vein. Only seven of Jodelle's 'Contr' Amours' are extant, but there is sufficient ident.i.ty of tone between them and Shakespeare's vituperative efforts almost to discover in Shakespeare's invectives a spark of Jodelle's satiric fire. {122} The dark lady of Shakespeare's 'sonnets' may therefore be relegated to the ranks of the creatures of his fancy. It is quite possible that he may have met in real life a dark-complexioned siren, and it is possible that he may have fared ill at her disdainful hands. But no such incident is needed to account for the presence of 'the dark lady' in the sonnets. It was the exacting conventions of the sonnetteering contagion, and not his personal experiences or emotions, that impelled Shakespeare to give 'the dark lady' of his sonnets a poetic being. {123} She has been compared, not very justly, with Shakespeare's splendid creation of Cleopatra in his play of 'Antony and Cleopatra.'

From one point of view the same criticism may be pa.s.sed on both. There is no greater and no less ground for seeking in Shakespeare's personal environment the original of 'the dark lady' of his sonnets than for seeking there the original of his Queen of Egypt.

IX--THE PATRONAGE OF THE EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON

Biographic fact in the 'dedicatory' sonnets.

Amid the borrowed conceits and poetic figures of Shakespeare's sonnets there lurk suggestive references to the circ.u.mstances in his external life that attended their composition. If few can be safely regarded as autobiographic revelations of sentiment, many of them offer evidence of the relations in which he stood to a patron, and to the position that he sought to fill in the circle of that patron's literary retainers. Twenty sonnets, which may for purposes of exposition be ent.i.tled 'dedicatory'

sonnets, are addressed to one who is declared without periphrasis and without disguise to be a patron of the poet's verse (Nos. xxiii., xxvi., x.x.xii., x.x.xvii., x.x.xviii., lxix., lxxvii.-lx.x.xvi., c., ci., cvi.) In one of these--Sonnet lxxviii.--Shakespeare a.s.serted:

So oft have I invoked thee for my Muse And found such fair a.s.sistance in my verse As every alien pen hath got my use And under thee their poesy disperse.

Subsequently he regretfully pointed out how his patron's readiness to accept the homage of other poets seemed to be thrusting him from the enviable place of pre-eminence in his patron's esteem.

The Earl of Southampton the poet's sole patron.

Shakespeare's biographer is under an obligation to attempt an identification of the persons whose relations with the poet are defined so explicitly. The problem presented by the patron is simple.

Shakespeare states unequivocally that he has no patron but one.

Sing [_sc._ O Muse!] to the ear that doth thy lays esteem, And gives thy pen both skill and argument (c. 7-8).

For to no other pa.s.s my verses tend Than of your graces and your gifts to tell (ciii. 11-12).

The Earl of Southampton, the patron of his narrative poems, is the only patron of Shakespeare that is known to biographical research. No contemporary doc.u.ment or tradition gives the faintest suggestion that Shakespeare was the friend or dependent of any other man of rank. A trustworthy tradition corroborates the testimony respecting Shakespeare's close intimacy with the Earl that is given in the dedicatory epistles of his 'Venus and Adonis' and 'Lucrece', penned respectively in 1593 and 1594. According to Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeare's first adequate biographer, 'there is one instance so singular in its magnificence of this patron of Shakespeare's that if I had not been a.s.sured that the story was handed down by Sir William D'Avenant, who was probably very well acquainted with his affairs, I should not venture to have inserted; that my Lord Southampton at one time gave him a thousand pounds to enable him to go through with a purchase which he heard he had a mind to. A bounty very great and very rare at any time.'

There is no difficulty in detecting the lineaments of the Earl of Southampton in those of the man who is distinctively greeted in the sonnets as the poet's patron. Three of the twenty 'dedicatory' sonnets merely translate into the language of poetry the expressions of devotion which had already done duty in the dedicatory epistle in prose that prefaces 'Lucrece.' That epistle to Southampton runs:

The love {127} I dedicate to your lords.h.i.+p is without end; whereof this pamphlet, without beginning, is but a superfluous moiety. The warrant I have of your honourable disposition, not the worth of my untutored lines, makes it a.s.sured of acceptance. What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have, devoted yours. Were my worth greater, my duty would show greater; meantime, as it is, it is bound to your lords.h.i.+p, to whom I wish long life, still lengthened with all happiness.

Your lords.h.i.+p's in all duty, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

Sonnet xxvi. is a gorgeous rendering of these sentences:--

Lord of my love, to whom in va.s.salage Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit, To thee I send this written amba.s.sage, To witness duty, not to show my wit: Duty so great, which wit so poor as mine May make seem bare, in wanting words to show it, But that I hope some good conceit of thine In thy soul's thought, all naked, will bestow it; Till whatsoever star that guides my moving, Points on me graciously with fair aspect, And puts apparel on my tatter'd loving To show me worthy of thy sweet respect Then may I dare to boast how I do love thee; Till then not show my head where thou may'st prove me. {128}

The 'Lucrece' epistle's intimation that the patron's love alone gives value to the poet's 'untutored lines' is repeated in Sonnet x.x.xii., which doubtless reflected a moment of depression:

If thou survive my well-contented day, When that churl Death my bones with dust shall cover, And shalt by fortune once more re-survey These poor rude lines of thy deceased lover, Compare them with the bettering of the time, 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.

O, then vouchsafe me but this loving thought: 'Had my friend's Muse grown with this growing age, A dearer birth than this his love had brought, To march in ranks of better equipage; {129} But since he died and poets better prove, Theirs for their style I'll read, his for his love.'

A like vein is pursued in greater exaltation of spirit in Sonnet x.x.xviii.:

How can my Muse want subject to invent, While thou dost breathe, that pour'st into my verse Thine own sweet argument, too excellent For every vulgar paper to rehea.r.s.e?

O give thyself the thanks, if aught in me Worthy perusal stand against thy sight; For who's so dumb that cannot write to thee, When thou thyself dost give invention light?

Be thou the tenth Muse, ten times more in worth Than those old nine which rhymers invocate; And he that calls on thee, let him bring forth Eternal numbers to outlive long date.

If my slight Muse do please these curious days, The pain be mine, but thine shall be the praise.

The central conceit here so finely developed--that the patron may claim as his own handiwork the _protege's_ verse because he inspires it--belongs to the most conventional schemes of dedicatory adulation.

When Daniel, in 1592, inscribed his volume of sonnets ent.i.tled 'Delia' to the Countess of Pembroke, he played in the prefatory sonnet on the same note, and used in the concluding couplet almost the same words as Shakespeare. Daniel wrote:

Great patroness of these my humble rhymes, Which thou from out thy greatness dost inspire . . .

O leave [_i.e._ cease] not still to grace thy work in me . . .

Whereof the travail I may challenge mine, But yet the glory, madam, must be thine.

Elsewhere in the Sonnets we hear fainter echoes of the 'Lucrece' epistle.

Repeatedly does the sonnetteer renew the a.s.surance given there that his patron is 'part of all' he has or is. Frequently do we meet in the Sonnets with such expressions as these:--

[I] by a _part of all_ your glory live (x.x.xvii. 12); Thou art _all the better part of me_ (x.x.xix. 2); My spirit is thine, _the better part of me_ (lxxiv. 8);

while 'the love without end' which Shakespeare had vowed to Southampton in the light of day reappears in sonnets addressed to the youth as 'eternal love' (cviii. 9), and a devotion 'what shall have no end' (cx.

9).

Rivals in Southampton's favour.

The identification of the rival poets whose 'richly compiled' 'comments'

of his patron's 'praise' excited Shakespeare's jealousy is a more difficult inquiry than the identification of the patron. The rival poets with their 'precious phrase by all the Muses filed' (lx.x.xv. 4) must be sought among the writers who eulogised Southampton and are known to have shared his patronage. The field of choice is not small. Southampton from boyhood cultivated literature and the society of literary men. In 1594 no n.o.bleman received so abundant a measure of adulation from the contemporary world of letters. {131a} Thomas Nash justly described the Earl, when dedicating to him his 'Life of Jack Wilton' in 1594, as 'a dear lover and cherisher as well of the lovers of poets as of the poets themselves.' Nash addressed to him many affectionately phrased sonnets.

The prolific sonnetteer Barnabe Barnes and the miscellaneous literary pract.i.tioner Gervase Markham confessed, respectively in 1593 and 1595, yearnings for Southampton's countenance in sonnets which glow hardly less ardently than Shakespeare's with admiration for his personal charm.

Similarly John Florio, the Earl's Italian tutor, who is traditionally reckoned among Shakespeare's literary acquaintances, {131b} wrote to Southampton in 1598, in his dedicatory epistle before his 'Worlde of Wordes' (an Italian-English dictionary), 'as to me and many more, the glorious and gracious suns.h.i.+ne of your honour hath infused light and life.'

Shakespeare's fear of a rival poet.

Shakespeare magnanimously and modestly described that _protege_ of Southampton, whom he deemed a specially dangerous rival, as an 'able' and a 'better' 'spirit,' 'a worthier pen,' a vessel of 'tall building and of goodly pride,' compared with whom he was himself 'a worthless boat.' He detected a touch of magic in the man's writing. His 'spirit,'

Shakespeare hyperbolically declared, had been 'by spirits taught to write above a mortal pitch,' and 'an affable familiar ghost' nightly gulled him with intelligence. Shakespeare's dismay at the fascination exerted on his patron by 'the proud full sail of his [rival's] great verse' sealed for a time, he declared, the springs of his own invention (lx.x.xvi.)

Barnabe Barnes probably the rival.

There is no need to insist too curiously on the justice of Shakespeare's laudation of the other poet's' powers. He was presumably a new-comer in the literary field who surprised older men of benevolent tendency into admiration by his promise rather than by his achievement. 'Eloquence and courtesy,' wrote Gabriel Harvey at the time, 'are ever bountiful in the amplifying vein;' and writers of amiability, Harvey adds, habitually blazoned the perfections that they hoped to see their young friends achieve, in language implying that they had already achieved them. All the conditions of the problem are satisfied by the rival's identification with the young poet and scholar Barnabe Barnes, a poetic panegyrist of Southampton and a prolific sonnetteer, who was deemed by contemporary critics certain to prove a great poet. His first collection of sonnets, 'Parthenophil and Parthenophe,' with many odes and madrigals interspersed, was printed in 1593; and his second, 'A Centurie of Spiritual Sonnets,' in 1595. Loud applause greeted the first book, which included numerous adaptations from the cla.s.sical, Italian, and French poets, and disclosed, among many crudities, some fascinating lyrics and at least one almost perfect sonnet (No. lxvi. 'Ah, sweet content, where is thy mild abode?') Thomas Churchyard called Barnes 'Petrarch's scholar;' the learned Gabriel Harvey bade him 'go forward in maturity as he had begun in pregnancy,' and 'be the gallant poet, like Spenser;'

Campion judged his verse to be 'heady and strong.' In a sonnet that Barnes addressed in this earliest volume to the 'virtuous' Earl of Southampton he declared that his patron's eyes were 'the heavenly lamps that give the Muses light,' and that his sole ambition was 'by flight to rise' to a height worthy of his patron's 'virtues.' Shakespeare sorrowfully pointed out in Sonnet lxxviii. that his lord's eyes

that taught the dumb on high to sing, And heavy ignorance aloft to fly, Have added feathers to the learned's wing, And given grace a double majesty;

while in the following sonnet he a.s.serted that the 'worthier pen' of his dreaded rival when lending his patron 'virtue' was guilty of plagiarism, for he 'stole that word' from his patron's 'behaviour.' The emphasis laid by Barnes on the inspiration that he sought from Southampton's 'gracious eyes' on the one hand, and his reiterated references to his patron's 'virtue' on the other, suggest that Shakespeare in these sonnets directly alluded to Barnes as his chief compet.i.tor in the hotly contested race for Southampton's favour. In Sonnet lx.x.xv. Shakespeare declares that 'he cries Amen to every hymn that able spirit [_i.e._ his rival]

affords.' Very few poets of the day in England followed Ronsard's practice of bestowing the t.i.tle of hymn on miscellaneous poems, but Barnes twice applies the word to his poems of love. {134a} When, too, Shakespeare in Sonnet lx.x.x. employs nautical metaphors to indicate the relations of himself and his rival with his patron--