Arnold wrote ‘spiritual,’ but the change of epithet is needful to render the dictum thoroughly pertinent to the topic under consideration. I have already published portions of the papers on Shakespeare’s relations with the Earls of Pembroke and Southampton in the Fortnightly Review (for February of this year) and in the Cornhill Magazine (for April of this year), and I have to thank the proprietors of those periodicals for permission to reproduce my material in this volume. For an account of its history see p. 295. See pp. 309 and 311. Camden, Remaines, ed. 1605, p. III; Verstegan, Restitution, 1605. Plac. Cor. 7 Edw. I, Kanc.; cf. Notes and Queries, 1st ser. xi.122. Cf. the Register of the Guild of St. Anne at Knowle, ed. Bickley, 1894. See p. 189. Cf. Times, October 14, 1895; Notes and Queries, 8th ser. viii. 501; articles by Mrs. Stopes in Genealogical Magazine, 1897. Cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, 1887, ii. 207. The purchasing power of money was then eight times what it is now, and this and other sums mentioned should be multiplied by eight in comparing them with modern currency (see p. 197 n). The letters of administration in regard to Richard Shakespeare’s estate are in the district registry of the Probate Court at Worcester, and were printed in full by Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps in his Shakespeare’s Tours (privately issued 1887), pp. 44-5. They do not appear in any edition of Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps’s Outlines. Certified extracts appeared in Notes and Queries, 8th ser. xii. 463-4. French, Genealogica Shakespeareana, pp. 458 seq.; cf. p. 191 infra. Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 179. Cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, Letter to Elze, 1888. Cf. Documents and Sketches in Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 377-99. The Rev. Thomas Carter, in Shakespeare, Puritan and Recusant, 1897, has endeavoured to show that John Shakespeare was a puritan in religious matters, inclining to nonconformity. He deduces this inference from the fact that, at the period of his prominent association with the municipal government of Stratford, the corporation ordered images to be defaced (1562-3) and ecclesiastical vestments to be sold (1571). These entries merely prove that the aldermen and councillors of Stratford strictly conformed to the new religion as by law established in the first years of Elizabeth’s reign. Nothing can be deduced from them in regard to the private religious opinions of John Shakespeare. The circumstance that he was the first bailiff to encourage actors to visit Stratford is, on the other hand, conclusive proof that his religion was not that of the contemporary puritan, whose hostility to all forms of dramatic representations was one of his most persistent characteristics. The Elizabethan puritans, too, according to Guillim’s Display of Heraldrie (1610), regarded coat-armour with abhorrence, yet John Shakespeare with his son made persistent application to the College of Arms for a grant of arms. (Cf. infra, p. 187 seq.) The sum is stated to be £4 in one document (Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 176) and £40 in another (ib. p. 179); the latter is more likely to be correct. Ib. ii. 238. Efforts recently made to assign the embarrassments of Shakespeare’s father to another John Shakespeare of Stratford deserve little attention. The second John Shakespeare or Shakspere (as his name is usually spelt) came to Stratford as a young man in 1584, and was for ten years a well-to-do shoemaker in Bridge Street, filling the office of Master of the Shoemakers’ Company in 1592—a certain sign of pecuniary stability. He left Stratford in 1594 (cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, 137-40). James Russell Lowell, who noticed some close parallels between expressions of Shakespeare and those of the Greek tragedians, hazarded the suggestion that Shakespeare may have studied the ancient drama in a GracÈ et LatinÈ edition. I believe Lowell’s parallelisms to be no more than curious accidents—proofs of consanguinity of spirit, not of any indebtedness on Shakespeare’s part. In the Electra of Sophocles, which is akin in its leading motive to Hamlet, the Chorus consoles Electra for the supposed death of Orestes with the same commonplace argument as that with which Hamlet’s mother and uncle seek to console him. In Electra, are the lines 1171-3:
T??t?? p?f??a? pat???, ????t?a, f???e?·
T??t?? d’ ???st?? ?ste ? ??a? st??e.
?as?? ?a? ??? t??t’ ?fe??eta? pa?e??
(i.e. ‘Remember, Electra, your father whence you sprang is mortal. Mortal, too, is Orestes. Wherefore grieve not overmuch, for by all of us has this debt of suffering to be paid’). In Hamlet (I. ii. 72 sq.) are the familiar sentences:
Thou know’st ’tis common; all that live must die.
But you must know, your father lost a father;
That father lost, lost his . . . But to persÈver
In obstinate condolement is a course
Of impious stubbornness.
Cf. Sophocles’s Œdipus Coloneus, 880: ???? t?? d??a???? ?a’ ?a??? ???a ??a? (‘In a just cause the weak vanquishes the strong,’ Jebb), and 2 Henry VI, iii. 233, ‘Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just.’ Shakespeare’s ‘prophetic soul’ in Hamlet (I. v. 40) and the Sonnets (cvii. I) may be matched by the p??a?t?? ???? of Euripides’s Andromache, 1075; and Hamlet’s ‘sea of troubles’ (III. i. 59) by the ?a??? p??a??? of Æschylus’s PersÆ, 443. Among all the creations of Shakespearean and Greek drama, Lady Macbeth and Æschylus’s Clytemnestra, who ‘in man’s counsels bore no woman’s heart’ (???a???? a?d??????? e?p???? ??a?, Agamemnon, II), most closely resemble each other. But a study of the points of resemblance attests no knowledge of Æschylus on Shakespeare’s part, but merely the close community of tragic genius that subsisted between the two poets. Macray, Annals of the Bodleian Library, 1890, pp. 379 seq. Cf. Spencer Baynes, ‘What Shakespeare learnt at School,’ in Shakespeare Studies, 1894, pp. 147 seq. Bishop Charles Wordsworth, in his Shakespeare’s Knowledge and Use of the Bible (4th edit. 1892), gives a long list of passages for which Shakespeare may have been indebted to the Bible. But the Bishop’s deductions as to the strength of Shakespeare’s piety are strained. See p. 161 infra. Notes of John Dowdall, a tourist in Warwickshire in 1693 (published in 1838). These conclusions are drawn from an examination of like documents in the Worcester diocesan registry. Many formal declarations of consent on the part of parents to their children’s marriages are also extant there among the sixteenth-century archives. Twelfth Night, act v. sc. i. ll. 160-4:
A contract of eternal bond of love,
Confirm’d by mutual joinder of your hands,
Attested by the holy close of lips,
Strengthen’d by interchangement of your rings;
And all the ceremony of this compact
Seal’d in my [i.e. the priest’s] function by my testimony.
In Measure for Measure Claudio’s offence is intimacy with the Lady Julia after the contract of betrothal and before the formality of marriage (cf. act i. sc. ii. l. 155, act iv. sc. i. l. 73). No marriage registers of the period are extant at Temple Grafton to inform us whether Anne Whately actually married her William Shakespeare or who precisely the parties were. A Whateley family resided in Stratford, but there is nothing to show that Anne of Temple Grafton was connected with it. The chief argument against the conclusion that the marriage license and the marriage bond concerned different couples lies in the apparent improbability that two persons, both named William Shakespeare, should on two successive days not only be arranging with the Bishop of Worcester’s official to marry, but should be involving themselves, whether on their own initiative or on that of their friends, in more elaborate and expensive forms of procedure than were habitual to the humbler ranks of contemporary society. But the Worcester diocese covered a very wide area, and was honeycombed with Shakespeare families of all degrees of gentility. The William Shakespeare whom Anne Whately was licensed to marry may have been of a superior station, to which marriage by license was deemed appropriate. On the unwarranted assumption of the identity of the William Shakespeare of the marriage bond with the William Shakespeare of the marriage license, a romantic theory has been based to the effect that ‘Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton,’ believing herself to have a just claim to the poet’s hand, secured the license on hearing of the proposed action of Anne Hathaway’s friends, and hoped, by moving in the matter a day before the Shottery husbandmen, to insure Shakespeare’s fidelity to his alleged pledges. Twelfth Night, act ii. sc. iv. l. 29:
Let still the woman take
An elder than herself; so wears she to him,
So sways she level in her husband’s heart.
Tempest, act iv. sc. i. ll. 15-22:
If thou dost break her virgin knot before
All sanctimonious ceremonies may
With full and holy rite be minister’d,
No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall
To make this contract grow; but barren hate,
Sour-ey’d disdain, and discord, shall bestrew
The union of your bed with weeds so loathly
That you shall hate it both.
Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 11-13. Cf. Ellacombe, Shakespeare as an Angler, 1883; J. E. Harting, Ornithology of Shakespeare, 1872. The best account of Shakespeare’s knowledge of sport is given by the Right Hon. D. H. Madden in his entertaining and at the same time scholarly Diary of Master William Silence: a Study of Shakespeare and Elizabethan Sport, 1897. Cf. C. Holte Bracebridge, Shakespeare no Deerstealer, 1862; Lockhart, Life of Scott, vii. 123. Cf. W. J. Thoms, Three Notelets on Shakespeare, 1865, pp. 16 seq. Cf. Hales, Notes on Shakespeare, 1884, pp. 1-24. The common assumption that Richard Burbage, the chief actor with whom Shakespeare was associated, was a native of Stratford is wholly erroneous. Richard was born in Shoreditch, and his father came from Hertfordshire. John Heming, another of Shakespeare’s actor-friends who has also been claimed as a native of Stratford, was beyond reasonable doubt born at Droitwich in Worcestershire. Thomas Greene, a popular comic actor at the Red Bull Theatre early in the seventeenth century, is conjectured to have belonged to Stratford on no grounds that deserve attention; Shakespeare was in no way associated with him. Blades, Shakspere and Typography, 1872. Cf. Lord Campbell, Shakespeare’s Legal Acquirements, 1859. Legal terminology abounded in all plays and poems of the period, e.g. Barnabe Barnes’s Sonnets, 1593, and Zepheria, 1594 (see Appendix IX.) Commonly assigned to Theophilus Cibber, but written by Robert Shiels and other hack-writers under Cibber’s editorship. The site of the Blackfriars Theatre is now occupied by the offices of the ‘Times’ newspaper in Queen Victoria Street, E.C. Cf. Exchequer Lay Subsidies City of London, 146/369, Public Record Office; Notes and Queries, 8th ser. viii. 418. Shakespeare alludes to the appearance of men or boys in women’s parts when he makes Rosalind say laughingly to the men of the audience in the epilogue to As you like it, ‘If I were a woman, I would kiss as many,’ etc. Similarly, Cleopatra on her downfall in Antony and Cleopatra, V. ii. 220 seq., laments:
the quick comedians
Extemporally will stage us . . . and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness.
Men taking women’s parts seem to have worn masks. Flute is bidden by Quince play Thisbe ‘in a mask’ in Midsummer Night’s Dream (I. ii. 53). In French and Italian theatres of the time women seem to have acted publicly, but until the Restoration public opinion in England deemed the appearance of a woman on a public stage to be an act of shamelessness on which the most disreputable of her sex would hardly venture. With a curious inconsistency ladies of rank were encouraged at Queen Elizabeth’s Court, and still more frequently at the Courts of James I and Charles I, to take part in private and amateur representations of masques and short dramatic pageants. During the reign of James I scenic decoration, usually designed by Inigo Jones, accompanied the production of masques in the royal palaces, but until the Restoration the public stages were bare of any scenic contrivance except a front curtain opening in the middle and a balcony or upper platform resting on pillars at the back of the stage, from which portions of the dialogue were sometimes spoken, although occasionally the balcony seems to have been occupied by spectators (cf. a sketch made by a Dutch visitor to London in 1596 of the stage of the Swan Theatre in Zur Kenntniss der altenglischen BÜhne von Karl Theodor Gaedertz. Mit der ersten authentischen innern Ansicht der Schwans Theater in London, Bremen, 1888). Sir Philip Sidney humorously described the spectator’s difficulties in an Elizabethan playhouse, where, owing to the absence of stage scenery, he had to imagine the bare boards to present in rapid succession a garden, a rocky coast, a cave, and a battlefield (Apologie for Poetrie, p. 52). Three flourishes on a trumpet announced the beginning of the performance, but a band of fiddlers played music between the acts. The scenes of each act were played without interruption. Cf. Halliwell-Phillipps’s Visits of Shakespeare’s Company of Actors to the Provincial Cities and Towns of England (privately printed, 1887). From the information there given, occasionally supplemented from other sources, the following imperfect itinerary is deduced:
1593. Bristol and Shrewsbury.
1594. Marlborough.
1597. Faversham, Bath, Rye, Bristol, Dover and Marlborough.
1603. Richmond (Surrey), Bath, Coventry, Shrewsbury, Mortlake, Wilton House.
1604. Oxford.
1605. Barnstaple and Oxford.
1606. Leicester, Saffron Walden, Marlborough, Oxford, Dover and Maidstone.
1607. Oxford.
1608. Coventry and Marlborough.
1609. Hythe, New Romney and Shrewsbury.
1610. Dover, Oxford and Shrewsbury.
1612. New Romney.
1613. Folkestone, Oxford and Shrewsbury.
1614. Coventry. Cf. Knight’s Life of Shakespeare (1843), p. 41; Fleay, Stage, pp. 135-6. The favour bestowed by James VI on these English actors was so marked as to excite the resentment of the leaders of the Kirk. The English agent, George Nicolson, in a (hitherto unpublished) despatch dated from Edinburgh on November 12, 1599, wrote: ‘The four Sessions of this Town (without touch by name of our English players, Fletcher and Mertyn [i.e. Martyn], with their company), and not knowing the King’s ordinances for them to play and be heard, enacted [that] their flocks [were] to forbear and not to come to or haunt profane games, sports, or plays.’ Thereupon the King summoned the Sessions before him in Council and threatened them with the full rigour of the law. Obdurate at first, the ministers subsequently agreed to moderate their hostile references to the actors. Finally, Nicolson adds, ‘the King this day by proclamation with sound of trumpet hath commanded the players liberty to play, and forbidden their hinder or impeachment therein.’ MS. State Papers, Dom. Scotland, P. R. O. vol. lxv. No. 64. Fleay, Stage, pp. 126-44. Cf. Duncan’s speech (on arriving at Macbeth’s castle of Inverness):
This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air
Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself
Unto our gentle senses.
Banquo. This guest of summer,
The temple-haunting martlet, does approve,
By his lov’d mansionry, that the heaven’s breath
Smells wooingly here. (Macbeth, 1. vi. 1-6).
Cf. Cohn, Shakespeare in Germany, 1865; Meissner, Die englischen ComÖdianten zur Zeit Shakespeare’s in Oesterreich, Vienna, 1884; Jon Stefansson on ‘Shakespeare at Elsinore’ in Contemporary Review, January 1896; Notes and Queries, 5th ser. ix. 43, and xi. 520; and M. Jusserand’s article in the Nineteenth Century, April 1898, on English actors in France. Cf. As you like it, IV. i. 22-40. Cf. Elze, Essays, 1874, pp. 254 seq. ‘Quality’ in Elizabethan English was the technical term for the ‘actor’s profession.’ Aubrey’s Lives, ed. Andrew Clark, ii. 226. Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 121; Mrs. Stopes in Jahrbuck der deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, 1896, xxxii. 182 seq. Scourge of Folly, 1610, epigr. 159. One of the many crimes laid to the charge of the dramatist Robert Greene was that of fraudulently disposing of the same play to two companies. ‘Ask the Queen’s players,’ his accuser bade him in Cuthbert Cony-Catcher’s Defence of Cony-Catching, 1592, ‘if you sold them not Orlando Furioso for twenty nobles [i.e. about £7], and when they were in the country sold the same play to the Lord Admiral’s men for as many more.’ The playhouse authorities deprecated the publishing of plays in the belief that their dissemination in print was injurious to the receipts of the theatre. A very small proportion of plays acted in Elizabeth’s and James I’s reign consequently reached the printing press, and most of them are now lost. But in the absence of any law of copyright publishers often defied the wishes of the owner of manuscripts. Many copies of a popular play were made for the actors, and if one of these copies chanced to fall into a publisher’s hands, it was habitually issued without any endeavour to obtain either author’s or manager’s sanction. In March 1599 the theatrical manager Philip Henslowe endeavoured to induce a publisher who had secured a playhouse copy of the comedy of Patient Grissell by Dekker, Chettle, and Haughton to abandon the publication of it by offering him a bribe of £2. The publication was suspended till 1603 (cf. Henslowe’s Diary, p. 167). As late as 1633 Thomas Heywood wrote of ‘some actors who think it against their peculiar profit to have them [i.e. plays] come into print.’ (English Traveller, pref.) W. S. Walker in his Shakespeare’s Versification, 1854, and Charles Bathurst in his Difference in Shakespeare’s Versification at different Periods of his Life, 1857, were the first to point out the general facts. Dr. Ingram’s paper on ‘The Weak Endings’ in New Shakspere Society’s Transactions (1874), vol. i., is of great value. Mr. Fleay’s metrical tables, which first appeared in the same society’s Transactions (1874), and have been reissued by Dr. Furnivall in a somewhat revised form in his introduction to Gervinus’s Commentaries and in his Leopold Shakspere, give all the information possible. The hero is the King of Navarre, in whose dominions the scene is laid. The two chief lords in attendance on him in the play, Biron and Longaville, bear the actual names of the two most strenuous supporters of the real King of Navarre (Biron’s later career subsequently formed the subject of two plays by Chapman, The Conspiracie of Duke Biron and The Tragedy of Biron, which were both produced in 1605). The name of the Lord Dumain in Love’s Labour’s Lost is a common anglicised version of that Duc de Maine or Mayenne whose name was so frequently mentioned in popular accounts of French affairs in connection with Navarre’s movements that Shakespeare was led to number him also among his supporters. Mothe or La Mothe, the name of the pretty, ingenious page, was that of a French ambassador who was long popular in London; and, though he left England in 1583, he lived in the memory of playgoers and playwrights long after Love’s Labour’s Lost was written. In Chapman’s An Humourous Day’s Mirth, 1599, M. Le Mot, a sprightly courtier in attendance on the King of France, is drawn from the same original, and his name, as in Shakespeare’s play, suggests much punning on the word ‘mote.’ As late as 1602 Middleton, in his Blurt, Master Constable, act ii. scene ii. line 215, wrote:
Ho God! Ho God! thus did I revel it
When Monsieur Motte lay here ambassador.
Armado, ‘the fantastical Spaniard’ who haunts Navarre’s Court, and is dubbed by another courtier ‘a phantasm, a Monarcho,’ is a caricature of a half-crazed Spaniard known as ‘fantastical Monarcho’ who for many years hung about Elizabeth’s Court, and was under the delusion that he owned the ships arriving in the port of London. On his death Thomas Churchyard wrote a poem called Fantasticall Monarcho’s Epitaph, and mention is made of him in Reginald Scott’s Discoverie of Witchcraft, 1584, p. 54. The name Armado was doubtless suggested by the expedition of 1588. Braggardino in Chapman’s Blind Beggar of Alexandria, 1598, is drawn on the same lines. The scene (Love’s Labour’s Lost, V. ii. 158 sqq.) in which the princess’s lovers press their suit in the disguise of Russians follows a description of the reception by ladies of Elizabeth’s Court in 1584 of Russian ambassadors who came to London to seek a wife among the ladies of the English nobility for the Tsar (cf. Horsey’s Travels, ed. E. A. Bond, Hakluyt Soc.) For further indications of topics of the day treated in the play, see A New Study of “Love’s Labour’s Lost,”’ by the present writer, in Gent. Mag, Oct. 1880; and Transactions of the New Shakspere Society, pt. iii. p. 80*. The attempt to detect in the schoolmaster Holofernes a caricature of the Italian teacher and lexicographer, John Florio, seems unjustified (see p. 85 n). Cf. Fleay, Life, pp. 188 seq. The story, which has been traced back to the Greek romance Anthia and Abrocomas by Xenophon Ephesius, a writer of the second century, seems to have been first told in modern Europe about 1470 by Masuccio in his Novellino (No. xxxiii.: cf. Mr. Waters’s translation, ii. 155-65). It was adapted from Masuccio by Luigi da Porto in his novel, La Giulietta, 1535, and by Bandello in his Novelle, 1554, pt. ii., No. ix. Bandello’s version became classical; it was translated in the Histoires Tragiques of FranÇoisde Belleforest (Paris, 1559) by Pierre Boaistuau de Launay, an occasional collaborator with Belleforest. At the same time as Shakespeare was writing Romeo and Juliet, Lope de Vega was dramatising the tale in his Spanish play called Castelvines y Monteses (i.e. Capulets and Montagus). For an analysis of Lope’s play, which ends happily, see Variorum Shakespeare, 1821, xxi. 451-60. Cf. Originals and Analogues, pt. i. ed. P. A. Daniel, New Shakspere Society. Cf. Parallel Texts, ed. P. A. Daniel, New Shakspere Society; Fleay, Life, pp. 191 seq. Cf. Fleay, Life, pp. 235 seq.; Trans. New Shakspere Soc., 1876, pt. ii. by Miss Jane Lee; Swinburne, Study, pp. 51 seq. In later life Shakespeare, in Hamlet, borrows from Lyly’s Euphues Polonius’s advice to Laertes; but, however he may have regarded the moral sentiment of that didactic romance, he had no respect for the affectations of its prose style, which he ridiculed in a familiar passage in I Henry IV, II. iv. 445: ‘For though the camomile, the more it is trodden on, the faster it grows, yet youth the more it is wasted, the sooner it wears.’ Henslowe, p. 24. Cf. Cohn, Shakespeare in Germany, pp. 155 et seq. Arber, ii. 644. Cf. W. G. Waters’s translation of Il Pecorone, pp. 44-60 (fourth day, novel 1). The collection was not published till 1558, and the story followed by Shakespeare was not accessible in his day in any language but the original Italian.
Lopez was the Earl of Leicester’s physician before 1586, and the Queen’s chief physician from that date. An accomplished linguist, with friends in all parts of Europe, he acted in 1590, at the request of the Earl of Essex, as interpreter to Antonio Perez, a victim of Philip II’s persecution, whom Essex and his associates brought to England in order to stimulate the hostility of the English public to Spain. Don Antonio (as the refugee was popularly called) proved querulous and exacting. A quarrel between Lopez and Essex followed. Spanish agents in London offered Lopez a bribe to poison Antonio and the Queen. The evidence that he assented to the murderous proposal is incomplete, but he was convicted of treason, and, although the Queen long delayed signing his death-warrant, he was hanged at Tyburn on June 7, 1594. His trial and execution evoked a marked display of anti-Semitism on the part of the London populace. Very few Jews were domiciled in England at the time. That a Christian named Antonio should be the cause of the ruin alike of the greatest Jew in Elizabethan England and of the greatest Jew of the Elizabethan drama is a curious confirmation of the theory that Lopez was the begetter of Shylock. Cf. the article on Roderigo Lopez in the Dictionary of National Biography; ‘The Original of Shylock,’ by the present writer, in Gent. Mag. February 1880; Dr. H. Graetz, Shylock in den Sagen, in den Dramen and in der Geschichte, Krotoschin, 1880; New Shakspere Soc. Trans. 1887-92, pt. ii. pp. 158-92; ‘The Conspiracy of Dr. Lopez,’ by the Rev. Arthur Dimock, in English Historical Review (1894), ix. 440 seq. Gesta Grayorum, printed in 1688 from a contemporary manuscript. A second performance of the Comedy of Errors was given at Gray’s Inn Hall by the Elizabethan Stage Society on Dec. 6, 1895. Cf. Swinburne, Study of Shakspere, pp. 231-74. See p. 89. Cf. Dodsley’s Old Plays, ed. W. C. Hazlitt, 1874, vii. 236-8. See Appendix, sections iii. and iv. See Ovid’s Amores, liber i. elegy xv. ll. 35-6. Ovid’s Amores, or Elegies of Love, were translated by Marlowe about 1589, and were first printed without a date on the title-page, probably about 1597. Marlowe’s version had probably been accessible in manuscript in the eight years’ interval. Marlowe rendered the lines quoted by Shakespeare thus:
Let base conceited wits admire vile things,
Fair Phoebus lead me to the Muses’ springs!
Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and Lodge’s Scillaes Metamorphosis, by James P. Reardon, in ‘Shakespeare Society’s Papers,’ iii. 143-6. Cf. Lodge’s description of Venus’s discovery of the wounded Adonis:
Her daintie hand addrest to dawe her deere,
Her roseall lip alied to his pale cheeke,
Her sighs and then her lookes and heavie cheere,
Her bitter threates, and then her passions meeke;
How on his senseles corpse she lay a-crying,
As if the boy were then but new a-dying.
In the minute description in Shakespeare’s poem of the chase of the hare (ll. 673-708) there are curious resemblances to the Ode de la Chasse (on a stag hunt) by the French dramatist, Estienne Jodelle, in his Œuvres et Meslanges PoÉtiques, 1574. Rosamond, in Daniel’s poem, muses thus when King Henry challenges her honour:
But what? he is my King and may constraine me;
Whether I yeeld or not, I live defamed.
The World will thinke Authoritie did gaine me,
I shall be judg’d his Love and so be shamed;
We see the faire condemn’d that never gamed,
And if I yeeld, ’tis honourable shame.
If not, I live disgrac’d, yet thought the same.
Watson makes this comment on his poem or passion on Time, (No. lxxvii.): ‘The chiefe contentes of this Passion are taken out of Seraphine [i.e. Serafino], Sonnet 132:
Col tempo passa[n] gli anni, i mesi, e l’hore,
Col tempo le richeze, imperio, e regno,
Col tempo fama, honor, fortezza, e ingegno,
Col tempo giouentÙ, con beltÀ more, &c.’
Watson adds that he has inverted Serafino’s order for ‘rimes sake,’ or ‘upon some other more allowable consideration.’ Shakespeare was also doubtless acquainted with Giles Fletcher’s similar handling of the theme in Sonnet xxviii. of his collection of sonnets called Licia (1593). ‘Excellencie of the English Tongue’ in Camden’s Remaines, p. 43. All these and all that els the Comick Stage
With seasoned wit and goodly pleasance graced,
By which mans life in his likest image
Was limned forth, are wholly now defaced . . .
And he, the man whom Nature selfe had made
To mock her selfe and Truth to imitate,
With kindly counter under mimick shade,
Our pleasant Willy, ah! is dead of late;
With whom all joy and jolly meriment
Is also deaded and in dolour drent.—(ll. 199-210). A note to this effect, in a genuine early seventeenth-century hand, was discovered by Halliwell-Phillipps in a copy of the 1611 edition of Spenser’s Works (cf. Outlines, ii. 394-5).
But that same gentle spirit, from whose pen
Large streames of bonnie and sweete nectar flowe,
Scorning the boldnes of such base-borne men
Which dare their follies forth so rashlie throwe,
Doth rather choose to sit in idle cell
Than so himselfe to mockerie to sell (ll. 217-22).
Section IX. of the Appendix to this volume gives a sketch of each of the numerous collections of sonnets which bore witness to the unexampled vogue of the Elizabethan sonnet between 1591 and 1597. Minto, Characteristics of English Poetry, 1885, pp. 371, 382. The sonnet, headed ‘Phaeton to his friend Florio,’ runs:
Sweet friend whose name agrees with thy increase
How fit arrival art thou of the Spring!
For when each branch hath left his flourishing,
And green-locked Summer’s shady pleasures cease:
She makes the Winter’s storms repose in peace,
And spends her franchise on each living thing:
The daisies sprout, the little birds do sing,
Herbs, gums, and plants do vaunt of their release.
So when that all our English Wits lay dead,
(Except the laurel that is ever green)
Thou with thy Fruit our barrenness o’erspread,
And set thy flowery pleasance to be seen.
Such fruits, such flow’rets of morality,
Were ne’er before brought out of Italy.
Cf. Shakespeare’s Sonnet xcviii. beginning:
When proud-pied April, dress’d in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in everything.
But like descriptions of Spring and Summer formed a topic that was common to all the sonnets of the period. Much has been written of Shakespeare’s alleged acquaintance with Florio. Farmer and Warburton argue that Shakespeare ridiculed Florio in Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost. They chiefly rely on Florio’s bombastic prefaces to his Worlde of Wordes and his translation of Montaigne’s Essays (1603). There is nothing there to justify the suggestion. Florio writes more in the vein of Armado than of Holofernes, and, beyond the fact that he was a teacher of languages to noblemen, he bears no resemblance to Holofernes, a village schoolmaster. Shakespeare doubtless knew Florio as Southampton’s protÉgÉ, and read his fine translation of Montaigne’s Essays with delight. He quotes from it in The Tempest: see p. 253. Shakespeare writes in his Sonnets:
My glass shall not persuade me I am old (xxii. 1.).
But when my glass shows me myself indeed,
Beated and chopp’d with tann’d antiquity (lxii. 9-10).
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang (lxxiii. 1-2).
My days are past the best (cxxxviii. 6).
Daniel in Delia (xxiii.) in 1591, when twenty-nine years old, exclaimed:
My years draw on my everlasting night,
. . . My days are done.
Richard Barnfield, at the age of twenty, bade the boy Ganymede, to whom he addressed his Affectionate Shepherd and a sequence of sonnets in 1594 (ed. Arber, p. 23):
Behold my gray head, full of silver hairs,
My wrinkled skin, deep furrows in my face.
Similarly Drayton in a sonnet (Idea, xiv.) published in 1594, when he was barely thirty-one, wrote:
Looking into the glass of my youth’s miseries,
I see the ugly face of my deformed cares
With withered brows all wrinkled with despairs;
and a little later (No. xliii. of the 1599 edition) he repeated how
Age rules my lines with wrinkles in my face.
All these lines are echoes of Petrarch, and Shakespeare and Drayton followed the Italian master’s words more closely than their contemporaries. Cf. Petrarch’s Sonnet cxliii. (to Laura alive), or Sonnet lxxxi. (to Laura after death); the latter begins:
Dicemi spesso il mio fidato speglio,
L’animo stanco e la cangiata scorza
E la scemata mia destrezza e forza:
Non ti nasconder piÙ: tu se’ pur veglio.
(i.e. ‘My faithful glass, my weary spirit and my wrinkled skin, and my decaying wit and strength repeatedly tell me: “It cannot longer be hidden from you, you are old.”’) The Sonnets of Sidney, Watson, Daniel, and Constable long circulated in manuscript, and suffered much the same fate as Shakespeare’s at the hands of piratical publishers. After circulating many years in manuscript, Sidney’s Sonnets were published in 1591 by an irresponsible trader, Thomas Newman, who in his self-advertising dedication wrote of the collection that it had been widely ‘spread abroad in written copies,’ and had ‘gathered much corruption by ill writers’ [i.e. copyists]. Constable produced in 1592 a collection of twenty sonnets in a volume which he entitled ‘Diana.’ This was an authorised publication. But in 1594 a printer and a publisher, without Constable’s knowledge or sanction, reprinted these sonnets and scattered them through a volume of nearly eighty miscellaneous sonnets by Sidney and many other hands; the adventurous publishers bestowed on their medley the title of ‘Diana,’ which Constable had distinctively attached to his own collection. Daniel suffered in much the same way. See Appendix IX. for further notes on the subject. Proofs of the commonness of the habit of circulating literature in manuscript abound. Fulke Greville, writing to Sidney’s father-in-law, Sir Francis Walsingham, in 1587, expressed regret that uncorrected manuscript copies of the then unprinted Arcadia were ‘so common.’ In 1591 Gabriel Cawood, the publisher of Robert Southwell’s Mary Magdalen’s Funeral Tears, wrote that manuscript copies of the work had long flown about ‘fast and false.’ Nash, in the preface to his Terrors of the Night, 1594, described how a copy of that essay, which a friend had ‘wrested’ from him, had ‘progressed [without his authority] from one scrivener’s shop to another, and at length grew so common that it was ready to be hung out for one of their figures [i.e. shop-signs], like a pair of indentures.’ Cf. Sonnet lxix. 12:
To thy fair flower add the rank smell of weeds.
For other instances of the application of this epithet to Shakespeare’s work, see p. 179, note 1. The actor Alleyn paid fivepence for a copy in that month (cf. Warner’s Dulwich MSS. p. 92). The chief editions of the sonnets that have appeared, with critical apparatus, of late years are those of Professor Dowden (1875, reissued 1896), Mr. Thomas Tyler (1890), and Mr. George Wyndham, M.P. (1898). Mr. Gerald Massey’s Secret Drama of Shakespeare’s Sonnets—the text of the poems with a full discussion—appeared in a second revised edition in 1888. I regret to find myself in more or less complete disagreement with all these writers, although I am at one with Mr. Massey in identifying the young man to whom many of the sonnets were addressed with the Earl of Southampton. A short bibliography of the works advocating the theory that the sonnets were addressed to William, third Earl of Pembroke, is given in Appendix VI., ‘Mr. William Herbert,’ note 1. It has been wrongly inferred that Shakespeare asserts in Sonnets cxxxv-vi. and cxliii. that the young friend to whom he addressed some of the sonnets bore his own christian name of Will (see for a full examination of these sonnets Appendix VIII.) Further, it has been fantastically suggested that the line (xx. 7) describing the youth as ‘A man in hue, all hues in his controlling’ (i.e. a man in colour or complexion whose charms are so varied as to appear to give his countenance control of, or enable it to assume, all manner of fascinating hues or complexions), and other applications to the youth of the ordinary word ‘hue,’ imply that his surname was Hughes. There is no other pretence of argument for the conclusion, which a few critics have hazarded in all seriousness, that the friend’s name was William Hughes. There was a contemporary musician called William Hughes, but no known contemporary of the name, either in age or position in life, bears any resemblance to the young man who is addressed by Shakespeare in his sonnets. See Appendix VI., ‘Mr. William Herbert;’ and VII., ‘Shakespeare and the Earl of Pembroke.’ The full results of my researches into Thorpe’s history, his methods of business, and the significance of his dedicatory addresses, of which four are extant besides that prefixed to the volume of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in 1609, are given in Appendix V., ‘The True History of Thomas Thorpe and “Mr. W. H.”’ The form of fourteen-line stanza adopted by Shakespeare is in no way peculiar to himself. It is the type recognised by Elizabethan writers on metre as correct and customary in England long before he wrote. George Gascoigne, in his Certayne Notes of Instruction concerning the making of Verse or Ryme in English (published in Gascoigne’s Posies, 1575), defined sonnets thus: ‘Fouretene lynes, every lyne conteyning tenne syllables. The first twelve to ryme in staves of foure lynes by cross metre and the last two ryming togither, do conclude the whole.’ In twenty-one of the 108 sonnets of which Sidney’s collection entitled Astrophel and Stella consists, the rhymes are on the foreign model and the final couplet is avoided. But these are exceptional. As is not uncommon in Elizabethan sonnet-collections, one of Shakespeare’s sonnets (xcix.) has fifteen lines; another (cxxvi.) has only twelve lines, and those in rhymed couplets (cf. Lodge’s Phillis, Nos. viii. and xxvi.) and a third (cxlv.) is in octosyllabics. But it is very doubtful whether the second and third of these sonnets rightly belong to Shakespeare’s collection. They were probably written as independent lyrics: see p. 97, note 1. If the critical ingenuity which has detected a continuous thread of narrative in the order that Thorpe printed Shakespeare’s sonnets were applied to the booksellers’ miscellany of sonnets called Diana (1594), that volume, which rakes together sonnets on all kinds of amorous subjects from all quarters and numbers them consecutively, could be made to reveal the sequence of an individual lover’s moods quite as readily, and, if no external evidence were admitted, quite as convincingly, as Thorpe’s collection of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Almost all Elizabethan sonnets are not merely in the like metre, but are pitched in what sounds superficially to be the same key of pleading or yearning. Thus almost every collection gives at a first perusal a specious and delusive impression of homogeneity. Shakespeare merely warns his ‘lovely boy’ that, though he be now the ‘minion’ of Nature’s ‘pleasure,’ he will not succeed in defying Time’s inexorable law. Sidney addresses in a lighter vein Cupid—‘blind hitting boy,’ he calls him—in his Astrophel (No. xlvi.) Cupid is similarly invoked in three of Drayton’s sonnets (No. xxvi. in the edition of 1594, and Nos. xxxiii. and xxxiv. in that of 1605), and in six in Fulke Greville’s collection entitled Coelica (cf. lxxxiv., beginning ‘Farewell, sweet boy, complain not of my truth’). Lyly, in his Sapho and Phao, 1584, and in his Mother Bombie, 1598, has songs of like temper addressed in the one case to ‘O Cruel love!’ and in the other to ‘O Cupid! monarch over kings.’ A similar theme to that of Shakespeare’s Sonnet cxxvi. is treated by John Ford in the song, ‘Love is ever dying,’ in his tragedy of the Broken Heart, 1633. See p. 113, note 2. 1547-1604. Cf. De Brach, Œuvres PoÉtiques, edited by Reinhold Dezeimeris, 1861, i. pp. 59-60. See Appendix IX. Section X. of the Appendix to this volume supplies a bibliographical note on the sonnet in France between 1550 and 1600, with a list of the sixteenth-century sonnetteers of Italy. Gabriel Harvey, in his Pierces Supererogation (1593, p. 61), after enthusiastic commendation of Petrarch’s sonnets (‘Petrarch’s invention is pure love itself; Petrarch’s elocution pure beauty itself’), justifies the common English practice of imitating them on the ground that ‘all the noblest Italian, French, and Spanish poets have in their several veins Petrarchized; and it is no dishonour for the daintiest or divinest Muse to be his scholar, whom the amiablest invention and beautifullest elocution acknowledge their master.’ Both French and English sonnetteers habitually admit that they are open to the charge of plagiarising Petrarch’s sonnets to Laura (cf. Du Bellay’s Les Amours, ed. Becq de FouquiÈres, 1876, p. 186, and Daniel’s Delia, Sonnet xxxviii.) The dependent relations in which both English and French sonnetteers stood to Petrarch may be best realised by comparing such a popular sonnet of the Italian master as No. ciii. (or in some editions lxxxviii.) in Sonetti in Vita di M. Laura, beginning ‘S’ amor non È, che dunque È quel ch’ i’ sento?’ with a rendering of it into French like that of De BaÏf in his Amours de Francine (ed. Becq de FouquiÈres, p. 121), beginning, ‘Si ce n’est pas Amour, que sent donques mon coeur?’ or with a rendering of the same sonnet into English like that by Watson in his Passionate Century, No. v., beginning, ‘If ’t bee not love I feele, what is it then?’ Imitation of Petrarch is a constant characteristic of the English sonnet throughout the sixteenth century from the date of the earliest efforts of Surrey and Wyatt. It is interesting to compare the skill of the early and late sonnetteers in rendering the Italian master. Petrarch’s sonnet In vita di M. Laura (No. lxxx. or lxxxi., beginning ‘Cesare, poi che ‘l traditor d’ Egitto’) was independently translated both by Sir Thomas Wyatt, about 1530 (ed. Bell, p. 60), and by Francis Davison in his Poetical Rhapsody (1602, ed. Bullen, i. 90). Petrarch’s sonnet (No. xcv. or cxiii.) was also rendered independently both by Wyatt (cf. Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie, ed. Arber, p. 23) and by Drummond of Hawthornden (ed. Ward, i. 100, 221). Eight of Watson’s sonnets are, according to his own account, renderings from Petrarch; twelve are from Serafino dell’ Aquila (1466-1500); four each come from Strozza, an Italian poet, and from Ronsard; three from the Italian poet Agnolo Firenzuola (1493-1548); two each from the French poet, Etienne Forcadel, known as Forcatulus (1514?-1573), the Italian Girolamo Parabosco (fl. 1548), and Æneas Sylvius; while many are based on passages from such authors as (among the Greeks) Sophocles, Theocritus, Apollonius of Rhodes (author of the epic ‘Argonautica’); or (among the Latins) Virgil, Tibullus, Ovid, Horace, Propertius, Seneca, Pliny, Lucan, Martial, and Valerius Flaccus; or (among other modern Italians) Angelo Poliziano (1454-1494) and Baptista Mantuanus (1448-1516); or (among other modern Frenchmen) Gervasius Sepinus of Saumur, writer of eclogues after the manner of Virgil and Mantuanus. No importance can be attached to Drayton’s pretensions to greater originality than his neighbours. The very line in which he makes the claim (‘I am no pick-purse of another’s wit’) is a verbatim theft from a sonnet of Sir Philip Sidney. Lodge’s Margarite, p. 79. See Appendix IX. for the text of Desportes’s sonnet (Diane, livre ii. No. iii.) and Lodge’s translation in Phillis. Lodge gave two other translations of the same sonnet of Desportes—in his romance of Rosalind (Hunterian Society’s reprint, p. 74), and in his volume of poems called Scillaes Metamorphosis (p. 44). Sonnet xxxiii. of Lodge’s Phillis is rendered with equal literalness from Ronsard. But Desportes was Lodge’s special master, See Drummond’s Poems, ed. W. C. Ward, in Muses’ Library, 1894, i. 207 seq. SÈve’s DÉlie was first published at Lyons in 1544. 1530-1579. In two of his century of sonnets (Nos. xiii. and xxiv. in 1594 edition, renumbered xxxii. and liii. in 1619 edition) Drayton hints that his ‘fair Idea’ embodied traits of an identifiable lady of his acquaintance, and he repeats the hint in two other short poems; but the fundamental principles of his sonnetteering exploits are defined explicitly in Sonnet xviii. in 1594 edition.
Some, when in rhyme, they of their loves do tell, . . .
Only I call [i.e. I call only] on my divine Idea.
Joachim du Bellay, one of the French poets who anticipated Drayton in addressing sonnets to ‘L’IdÉe,’ left the reader in no doubt of his intent by concluding one poem thus:
LÀ, Ô mon Âme, au plus hault ciel guidÉe,
Tu y pourras recognoistre l’IdÉe
De la beautÉ qu’en ce monde j’adore.
(Du Bellay’s Olive, No. cxiii., published in 1568.)
Ben Jonson pointedly noticed the artifice inherent in the metrical principles of the sonnet when he told Drummond of Hawthornden that ‘he cursed Petrarch for redacting verses to sonnets which he said were like that tyrant’s bed, where some who were too short were racked, others too long cut short.’ (Jonson’s Conversation, p. 4). See p. 121 infra. They were first printed by Dr. Grosart for the Chetham Society in 1873 in his edition of ‘the Dr. Farmer MS.,’ a sixteenth and seventeenth century commonplace book preserved in the Chetham Library at Manchester, pt. i. pp. 76-81. Dr. Grosart also included the poems in his edition of Sir John Davies’s Works, 1876, ii. 53-62. Davies’s Sonnet viii. is printed in Appendix IX. See p. 127 infra. Romeo and Juliet, II. iv. 41-4. Mr. Fleay in his Biographical Chronicle of the English Stage, ii. 226 seq., gives a striking list of parallels between Shakespeare’s and Drayton’s sonnets which any reader of the two collections in conjunction could easily increase. Mr. Wyndham in his valuable edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, p. 255, argues that Drayton was the plagiarist of Shakespeare, chiefly on bibliographical grounds, which he does not state quite accurately. One hundred sonnets belonging to Drayton’s Idea series are extant, but they were not all published by him at one time. Fifty-three were alone included in his first and only separate edition of 1594; six more appeared in a reprint of Idea appended to the Heroical Epistles in 1599; twenty-four of these were gradually dropped and thirty-four new ones substituted in reissues appended to volumes of his writings issued respectively in 1600, 1602, 1603, and 1605. To the collection thus re-formed a further addition of twelve sonnets and a withdrawal of some twelve old sonnets were made in the final edition of Drayton’s works in 1619. There the sonnets number sixty-three. Mr. Wyndham insists that Drayton’s latest published sonnets have alone an obvious resemblance to Shakespeare’s sonnets, and that they all more or less reflect Shakespeare’s sonnets as printed by Thorpe in 1609. But the whole of Drayton’s century of sonnets except twelve were in print long before 1609, and it could easily be shown that the earliest fifty-three published in 1594 supply as close parallels with Shakespeare’s sonnets as any of the forty-seven published subsequently. Internal evidence suggests that all but one or two of Drayton’s sonnets were written by him in 1594, in the full tide of the sonnetteering craze. Almost all were doubtless in circulation in manuscript then, although only fifty-three were published in 1594. Shakespeare would have had ready means of access to Drayton’s manuscript collection. Mr. Collier reprinted all the sonnets that Drayton published between 1594 and 1619 in his edition of Drayton’s poems for the Roxburghe Club, 1856. Other editions of Drayton’s sonnets of this and the last century reprint exclusively the collection of sixty-three appended to the edition of his works in 1619. Almost all sixteenth-century sonnets on spring in the absence of the poet’s love (cf. Shakespeare’s Sonnets xcviii., xcix.) are variations on the sentiment and phraseology of Petrarch’s well-known sonnet xlii., ‘In morte di M. Laura,’ beginning:
Zefiro torna e ‘l bel tempo rimena,
E i fiori e l’erbe, sua dolce famiglia,
E garrir Progne e pianger Filomena,
E primavera candida e vermiglia.
Ridono i prati, e ‘l ciel si rasserena;
Giove s’allegra di mirar sua figlia;
L’aria e l’acqua e la terra È d’amor piena;
Ogni animal d’amar si riconsiglia,
Ma per me, lasso, tornano i piÙ gravi
Sospiri, che del cor profondo tragge, &c.
See a translation by William Drummond of Hawthornden in Sonnets, pt. ii. No. ix. Similar sonnets and odes on April, spring, and summer abound in French and English (cf. Becq de Fouquiere’s Œuvres choisies de J.-A. de BaÏf, passim, and Œuvres choisies des Contemporains de Ronsard, p. 108 (by Remy Belleau), p. 129 (by Amadis Jamyn) et passim). For descriptions of night and sleep see especially Ronsard’s Amours (livre i. clxxxvi., livre ii. xxii.; Odes, livre iv. No. iv., and his Odes RetranchÉes in Œuvres, edited by Blanchemain, ii. 392-4.) Cf. Barnes’s Parthenophe and Parthenophil, lxxxiii. cv. Cf. Ronsard’s Amours, livre iv. clxxviii.; Amours pour AstrÉe, vi. The latter opens:
Il ne falloit, maistresse, autres tablettes
Pour vous graver que celles de mon coeur
OÙ de sa main Amour, nostre vainqueur,
Vous a gravÉe et vos grÂces parfaites.
Cf. Spenser, lv.; Barnes’s Parthenophe and Parthenophil, No. lxxvii.; Fulke Greville’s Coelica, No. vii. A similar conceit is the topic of Shakespeare’s Sonnet xxiv. Ronsard’s Ode (livre iv. No. xx.) consists of a like dialogue between the heart and the eye. The conceit is traceable to Petrarch, whose Sonnet lv. or lxiii. (‘Occhi, piangete, accompagnate il core’) is a dialogue between the poet and his eyes, while his Sonnet xcix. or cxvii. is a companion dialogue between the poet and his heart. Cf. Watson’s Tears of Fancie, xix. xx. (a pair of sonnets on the theme which closely resemble Shakespeare’s pair); Drayton’s Idea, xxxiii.; Barnes’s Parthenophe and Parthenophil, xx., and Constable’s Diana, vi. 7. The Greek epigram is in Palatine Anthology, ix. 627, and is translated into Latin in Selecta Epigrammata, Basel, 1529. The Greek lines relate, as in Shakespeare’s sonnets, how a nymph who sought to quench love’s torch in a fountain only succeeded in heating the water. An added detail Shakespeare borrowed from a very recent adaptation of the epigram in Giles Fletcher’s Licia, 1593 (Sonnet xxvii.), where the poet’s Love bathes in the fountain, with the result not only that ‘she touched the water and it burnt with Love,’ but also
Now by her means it purchased hath that bliss
Which all diseases quickly can remove.
Similarly Shakespeare in Sonnet cliv. not merely states that the ‘cool well’ into which Cupid’s torch had fallen ‘from Love’s fire took heat perpetual,’ but also that it grew ‘a bath and healthful remedy for men diseased.’ In Greek poetry the topic is treated in Pindar’s Olympic Odes, xi., and in a fragment by Sappho, No. 16 in Bergk’s PoetÆ Lyrici GrÆci. In Latin poetry the topic is treated in Ennius as quoted in Cicero, De Senectute, c. 207; in Horace’s Odes, iii. 30; in Virgil’s Georgics, iii. 9; in Propertius, iii. 1; in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, xv. 871 seq.; and in Martial, x. 27 seq. Among French sonnetteers Ronsard attacked the theme most boldly. His odes and sonnets promise immortality to the persons to whom they are addressed with an extravagant and a monotonous liberality. The following lines from Ronsard’s Ode (livre i. No. vii.) ‘Au Seigneur Carnavalet,’ illustrate his habitual treatment of the theme:—
C’est un travail de bon-heur
Chanter les hommes louables,
Et leur bastir un honneur
Seul vainqueur des ans muables.
Le marbre ou l’airain vestu
D’un labeur vif par l’enclume
N’animent tant la vertu
Que les Muses par la plume. . .
Les neuf divines pucelles
Gardent ta gloire chez elles;
Et mon luth, qu’ell’ont fait estre
De leurs secrets le grand prestre,
Par cest hymne solennel
Respandra dessus ta race
Je ne sÇay quoy de sa grace
Qui te doit faire eternel.
(Œuvres de Ronsard, ed. Blanchemain, ii. 58, 62.)
I quote two other instances from Ronsard on p. 116, note 1. Desportes was also prone to indulge in the same conceit; cf. his Cleonice, sonnet 62, which Daniel appropriated bodily in his Delia Sonnet xxvi.) Desportes warns his mistress that she will live in his verse like the phoenix in fire. Ed. Shuckburgh, p. 62. Shakespeare Soc. p. 93 Other references to the topic appear in Sonnets xix., liv., lxiii., lxv., lxxxi. and cvii. See the quotation from Ronsard on p. 114, note 1. This sonnet is also very like Ronsard’s Ode (livre v. No. xxxii.) ‘A sa Muse,’ which opens:
Plus dur que fer j’ay fini mon ouvrage,
Que ‘an, dispos À demener les pas,
Que l’eau, le vent ou le brulant orage,
L’injuriant, ne ru’ront point À bas.
Quand ce viendra que le dernier trespas
M’assoupira d’un somme dur, À l’heure,
Sous le tombeau tout Ronsard n’ira pas,
Restant de luy la part meilleure. . .
Sus donque, Muse, emporte au ciel la gloire
Que j’ay gaignÉe, annonÇant la victoire
Dont À bon droit je me voy jouissant. . .
Cf. also Ronsard’s Sonnet lxxii. in Amours (livre i.), where he declares that his mistress’s name
Victorieux des peuples et des rois
S’en voleroit sus l’aile de ma ryme.
But Shakespeare, like Ronsard, knew Horace’s far-famed Ode (bk. iii. 30)
Exegi monumentum Ære perennius
Regalique situ pyramidum altius,
Quod non imber edax, non Aquilo impotens
Possit diruere, aut innumerabilis
Annorum series, et fuga temporum.
Nor can there be any doubt that Shakespeare wrote with a direct reference to the concluding nine lines of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (xv. 871-9):
Jamque opus exegi, quod nec Jovis ira nec ignes,
Nec poterit ferrum, nec edax abolere vetustas.
Cum volet illa dies, quÆ nil nisi corporis hujus
Jus habet, incerti spatium mihi finiat Ævi;
Parte tamen meliore mei super alta perennis
Astra ferar nomenque erit indelebile nostrum.
This passage was familiar to Shakespeare in one of his favourite books—Golding’s translation of the Metamorphoses. Golding’s rendering opens:
Now have I brought a worke to end which neither Jove’s fierce wrath
Nor sword nor fire nor fretting age, with all the force it hath
Are able to abolish quite, &c.
Meres, after his mention of Shakespeare’s sonnets in his Palladis Tamia (1598), quotes parts of both passages from Horace and Ovid, and gives a Latin paraphrase of his own, which, he says, would fit the lips of our contemporary poets besides Shakespeare. The introduction of the name Mars into Meres’s paraphrase as well as into line 7 of Shakespeare’s Sonnet lv. led Mr. Tyler (on what are in any case very trivial grounds) to the assumption that Shakespeare was borrowing from his admiring critic, and was therefore writing after 1598, when Meres’s book was published. In Golding’s translation reference is made to Mars by name (the Latin here calls the god Gradivus) a few lines above the passage already quoted, and the word caught Shakespeare’s eye there. Shakespeare owed nothing to Meres’s paraphrase, but Meres probably owed much to passages in Shakespeare’s sonnets. See Appendix VIII., ‘The Will Sonnets,’ for the interpretation of Shakespeare’s conceit and like efforts of Barnes. Wires in the sense of hair was peculiarly distinctive of the sonnetteers’ affected vocabulary. Cf. Daniel’s Delia, 1591, No. xxvi., ‘And golden hair may change to silver wire;’ Lodge’s Phillis, 1595, ‘Made blush the beauties of her curlÈd wire;’ Barnes’s Parthenophil, sonnet xlviii., ‘Her hairs no grace of golden wires want.’ The comparison of lips with coral is not uncommon outside the Elizabethan sonnet, but it was universal there. Cf. ‘Coral-coloured lips’ (Zepheria, 1594, No. xxiii.); ‘No coral is her lip’ (Lodge’s Phillis, 1595, No. viii.) ‘Ce beau coral’ are the opening words of Ronsard’s Amours, livre i. No. xxiii., where a list is given of stones and metals comparable with women’s features. Shakespeare adopted this phraseology of Sidney literally in both the play and the sonnet; while Sidney’s further conceit that the lady’s eyes are in ‘this mourning weed’ in order ‘to honour all their deaths who for her bleed’ is reproduced in Shakespeare’s Sonnet cxxxii.—one of the two under consideration—where he tells his mistress that her eyes ‘have put on black’ to become ‘loving mourners’ of him who is denied her love.
O paradox! Black is the badge of hell,
The hue of dungeons and the scowl of night.
(Love’s Labour’s Lost, IV. iii. 254-5).
To look like her are chimney-sweepers black,
And since her time are colliers counted bright,
And Ethiops of their sweet complexion crack.
Dark needs no candle now, for dark is light (ib. 266-9).
The parody, which is not in sonnet form, is printed in Harvey’s Letter-book (Camden Soc. pp. 101-43). No. vii. of Jodelle’s Contr’ Amours runs thus:
Combien de fois mes vers ont-ils dorÉ
Ces cheueux noirs dignes d’vne Meduse?
Combien de fois ce teint noir qui m’amuse,
Ay-ie de lis et roses colorÉ?
Combien ce front de rides labourÉ
Ay-ie applani? et quel a fait ma Muse
Le gros sourcil, oÙ folle elle s’abuse,
Ayant sur luy l’arc d’Amour figurÉ?
Quel ay-ie fait son oeil se renfonÇant?
Quel ay-ie fait son grand nez rougissant?
Quelle sa bouche et ses noires dents quelles
Quel ay-ie fait le reste de ce corps?
Qui, me sentant endurer mille morts,
Viuoit heureux de mes peines mortelles.
(Jodelle’s Œuvres, 1597, pp. 91-94.)
With this should be compared Shakespeare’s sonnets cxxxvii., cxlviii., and cl. Jodelle’s feigned remorse for having lauded the black hair and complexion of his mistress is one of the most singular of several strange coincidences. In No. vi. of his Contr’ Amours Jodelle, after reproaching his ‘traitres vers’ with having untruthfully described his siren as a beauty, concludes:
‘Ja si long temps faisant d’un Diable vn Ange
Vous m’ouurez l’oeil en l’iniuste louange,
Et m’aueuglez en l’iniuste tourment.
With this should be compared Shakespeare’s Sonnet cxliv., lines 9-10.
And whether that my angel be turn’d fiend
Suspect I may, yet not directly tell.
A conventional sonnet or extravagant vituperation, which Drummond of Hawthornden translated from Marino (Rime, 1602, pt. i. p. 76), is introduced with grotesque inappropriateness into Drummond’s collection of ‘sugared’ sonnets (see pt. i. No. xxxv: Drummond’s Poems, ed. W. C. Ward, i. 69, 217). The theories that all the sonnets addressed to a woman were addressed to the ‘dark lady,’ and that the ‘dark lady’ is identifiable with Mary Fitton, a mistress of the Earl of Pembroke, are baseless conjectures. The extant portraits of Mary Fitton prove her to be fair. The introduction of her name into the discussion is solely due to the mistaken notion that Shakespeare was the protÉgÉ of Pembroke, that most of the sonnets were addressed to him, and that the poet was probably acquainted with his patron’s mistress. See Appendix VII. The expressions in two of the vituperative sonnets to the effect that the disdainful mistress had ‘robb’d others’ beds’ revenues of their rents’ (cxlii. 8) and ‘in act her bed-vow broke’ (clii. 37) have been held to imply that the woman denounced by Shakespeare was married. The first quotation can only mean that she was unfaithful with married men, but both quotations seem to be general phrases of abuse, the meaning of which should not be pressed closely. ‘Lover’ and ‘love’ in Elizabethan English were ordinary synonyms for ‘friend’ and ‘friendship.’ Brutus opens his address to the citizens of Rome with the words, ‘Romans, countrymen, and lovers,’ and subsequently describes Julius CÆsar as ‘my best lover’ (Julius CÆsar, III. ii. 13-49). Portia, when referring to Antonio, the bosom friend of her husband Bassanio, calls him ‘the bosom lover of my lord’ (Merchant of Venice, III. iv. 17). Ben Jonson in his letters to Donne commonly described himself as his correspondent’s ‘ever true lover;’ and Drayton, writing to William Drummond of Hawthornden, informed him that an admirer of his literary work was in love with him. The word ‘love’ was habitually applied to the sentiment subsisting between an author and his patron. Nash, when dedicating Jack Wilton in 1594 to Southampton, calls him ‘a dear lover . . . of the lovers of poets as of the poets themselves.’ There is little doubt that this sonnet was parodied by Sir John Davies in the ninth and last of his ‘gulling’ sonnets, in which he ridicules the notion that a man of wit should put his wit in vassalage to any one.
To love my lord I do knight’s service owe,
And therefore now he hath my wit in ward;
But while it [i.e. the poet’s wit] is in his tuition so
Methinks he doth intreat [i.e. treat] it passing hard . . .
But why should love after minority
(When I have passed the one and twentieth year)
Preclude my wit of his sweet liberty,
And make it still the yoke of wardship bear?
I fear he [i.e. my lord] hath another title [i.e. right to my wit] got
And holds my wit now for an idiot.
Mr. Tyler assigns this sonnet to the year 1598 or later, on the fallacious ground that this line was probably imitated from an expression in Marston’s Pigmalion’s Image, published in 1598, where ‘stanzas’ are said to ‘march rich bedight in warlike equipage.’ The suggestion of plagiarism is quite gratuitous. The phrase was common in Elizabethan literature long before Marston employed it. Nash, in his preface to Green’s Menaphon, which was published in 1589, wrote that the works of the poet Watson ‘march in equipage of honour with any of your ancient poets.’ See Appendix IV. for a full account of Southampton’s relations with Nash and other men of letters. See p. 85, note. Cf. Parthenophil, Madrigal i. line 12; Sonnet xvii. line 9. Parthenophil, Sonnet xci. Much irrelevance has been introduced into the discussion of Chapman’s claim to be the rival poet. Prof. Minto in his Characteristics of English Poets, p. 291, argued that Chapman was the man mainly because Shakespeare declared his competitor to be taught to write by ‘spirits’—‘his compeers by night’—as well as by ‘an affable familiar ghost’ which gulled him with intelligence at night (lxxxvi. 5 seq.) Professor Minto saw in these phrases allusions to some remarks by Chapman in his Shadows of Night (1594), a poem on Night. There Chapman warned authors in one passage that the spirit of literature will often withhold itself from them unless it have ‘drops of their blood like a heavenly familiar,’ and in another place sportively invited ‘nimble and aspiring wits’ to join him in consecrating their endeavours to ‘sacred night.’ There is really no connection between Shakespeare’s theory of the supernatural and nocturnal sources of his rival’s influence and Chapman’s trite allusion to the current faith in the power of ‘nightly familiars’ over men’s minds and lives, or Chapman’s invitation to his literary comrades to honour Night with him. It is supererogatory to assume that Shakespeare had Chapman’s phrases in his mind when alluding to superstitions which were universally acknowledged. It could be as easily argued on like grounds that Shakespeare was drawing on other authors. Nash in his prose tract called independently The Terrors of the Night, which was also printed in 1594, described the nocturnal habits of ‘familiars’ more explicitly than Chapman. The publisher Thomas Thorpe, in dedicating in 1600 Marlowe’s translation of Lucan (bk. i.) to his friend Edward Blount, humorously referred to the same topic when he reminded Blount that ‘this spirit [i.e. Marlowe], whose ghost or genius is to be seen walk the Churchyard [of St. Paul’s] in at the least three or four sheets . . . was sometime a familiar of your own.’ On the strength of these quotations, and accepting Professor Minto’s line of argument, Nash, Thorpe, or Blount, whose ‘familiar’ is declared to have been no less a personage than Marlowe, has as good a claim as Chapman to be the rival poet of Shakespeare’s sonnets. A second and equally impotent argument in Chapman’s favour has been suggested. Chapman in the preface to his translation of the Iliads (1611 ) denounces without mentioning any name ‘a certain envious windsucker that hovers up and down, laboriously engrossing all the air with his luxurious ambition, and buzzing into every ear my detraction.’ It is suggested that Chapman here retaliated on Shakespeare for his references to him as his rival in the sonnets; but it is out of the question that Chapman, were he the rival, should have termed those high compliments ‘detraction.’ There is no ground for identifying Chapman’s ‘windsucker’ with Shakespeare (cf. Wyndham, p. 255). The strongest point in favour of the theory of Chapman’s identity with the rival poet lies in the fact that each of the two sections of his poem The Shadow of the Night (1594) is styled a ‘hymn,’ and Shakespeare in Sonnet lxxxv. 6-7 credits his rival with writing ‘hymns.’ But Drayton, in his Harmonie of the Church, 1591, and Barnes, as we have just seen, both wrote ‘hymns.’ The word was not loosely used in Elizabethan English, as in sixteenth-century French, in the general sense of ‘poem.’ See p. 127, note I. Sir Walter Ralegh was wont to apostrophise his aged sovereign thus:
Oh, hopeful love, my object and invention,
Oh, true desire, the spur of my conceit,
Oh, worthiest spirit, my mind’s impulsion,
Oh, eyes transparent, my affection’s bait;
Oh, princely form, my fancy’s adamant,
Divine conceit, my pain’s acceptance,
Oh, all in one! Oh, heaven on earth transparent!
The seat of joy and love’s abundance!
(Cf. Cynthia, a fragment in Poems of Raleigh, ed. Hannah, p. 33.) When Ralegh leaves Elizabeth’s presence he tell us his ‘forsaken heart’ and his ‘withered mind’ were ‘widowed of all the joys’ they ‘once possessed.’ Only some 500 lines (the twenty-first book and a fragment of another book) survive of Ralegh’s poem Cynthia, the whole of which was designed to prove his loyalty to the Queen, and all the extant lines are in the same vein as those I quote. The complete poem extended to twenty-two books, and the lines exceeded 10,000, or five times as many as in Shakespeare’s sonnets. Richard Barnfield in his like-named poem of Cynthia, 1595, and Fulke Greville in sonnets addressed to Cynthia, also extravagantly described the Queen’s beauty and graces. In 1599 Sir John Davies, poet and lawyer, apostrophised Elizabeth, who was then sixty-six years old, thus:
Fair soul, since to the fairest body knit
You give such lively life, such quickening power,
Such sweet celestial influences to it
As keeps it still in youth’s immortal flower . . .
O many, many years may you remain
A happy angel to this happy land (Nosce Teipsum, dedication).
Davies published in the same year twenty-six ‘Hymnes of Astrea’ on Elizabeth’s beauty and graces; each poem forms an acrostic on the words ‘Elizabetha Regina,’ and the language of love is simulated on almost every page. Apologie for Poetrie (1595), ed. Shuckburgh, p. 62. Adulatory sonnets to patrons are met with in the preliminary or concluding pages of numerous sixteenth and seventeenth century books (e.g. the collection of sonnets addressed to James VI of Scotland in his Essayes of a Prentise, 1591, and the sonnets to noblemen before Spenser’s Faerie Queene, at the end of Chapman’s Iliad, and at the end of John Davies’s Microcosmos, 1603). Other sonnets to patrons are scattered through collections of occasional poems, such as Ben Jonson’s Forest and Underwoods and Donne’s Poems. Sonnets addressed to men are not only found in the preliminary pages, but are occasionally interpolated in sonnet-sequences of fictitious love. Sonnet xi. in Drayton’s sonnet-fiction called ‘Idea’ (in 1599 edition) seems addressed to a man, in much the same manner as Shakespeare often addressed his hero; and a few others of Drayton’s sonnets are ambiguous as to the sex of their subject. John Soothern’s eccentric collection of love-sonnets, Pandora (1584), has sonnets dedicatory to the Earl of Oxford; and William Smith in his Chloris (1596) (a sonnet-fiction of the conventional kind) in two prefatory sonnets and in No. xlix. of the substantive collection invokes the affectionate notice of Edmund Spenser. Throughout Europe ‘dedicatory’ sonnets or poems to women betray identical characteristics to those that were addressed to men. The poetic addresses to the Countess of Bedford and other noble patronesses of Donne, Ben Jonson, and their colleagues are always affectionate, often amorous, in their phraseology, and akin in temper to Shakespeare’s sonnets of friendship. Nicholas Breton, in his poem The Pilgrimage to Paradise coyned with the Countess of Pembroke’s Love, 1592, and another work of his, The Countess of Pembroke’s Passion (first printed from manuscript in 1867), pays the Countess, who was merely his literary patroness, a homage which is indistinguishable from the ecstatic utterances of a genuine and overmastering passion. The difference in the sex of the persons addressed by Breton and by Shakespeare seems to place their poems in different categories, but they both really belonged to the same class. They both merely display a protÉgÉ’s loyalty to his patron, couched, according to current convention, in the strongest possible terms of personal affection. In Italy and France exactly the same vocabulary of adoration was applied by authors indifferently to patrons and patronesses. It is known that one series of Michael Angelo’s impassioned sonnets was addressed to a young nobleman Tommaso dei Cavalieri, and another series to a noble patroness Vittoria Colonna, but the tone is the same in both, and internal evidence fails to enable the critic to distinguish between the two series. Only one English contemporary of Shakespeare published a long series of sonnets addressed to a man who does not prove on investigation to have been a professional patron. In 1595 Richard Barnfield appended to his poem Cynthia a set of twenty sonnets, in which he feignedly avowed affection for a youth called Ganymede. These poems do not belong to the same category as Shakespeare’s, but to the category of sonnet-sequences of love in which it was customary to invoke a fictitious mistress. Barnfield explained that in his sonnets he attempted a variation on the conventional practice by fancifully adapting to the sonnet-form the second of Virgil’s Eclogues, in which the shepherd Corydon apostrophises the shepherd-boy Alexis. Cf. Sonnet lix.
Show me your image in some antique book . . .
Oh sure I am the wits of former days
To subjects worse have given admiring praise.
Campion’s Poems, ed. Bullen, pp. 148 seq. Cf. Shakespeare’s sonnets:
O how I faint when I of you do write.—(lxxx. 1.)
Finding thy worth a limit past my praise.—(lxxxii. 6.)
Donne’s Poems (in Muses’ Library), ii. 34. See also Donne’s sonnets and verse-letters to Mr. Rowland Woodward and Mr. I. W. See p. 386 note 1. Three years was the conventional period which sonnetteers allotted to the development of their passion. Cf. Ronsard, Sonnets pour HÉlÈne (No. xiv.), beginning: ‘Trois ans sont ja passez que ton oeil me tient pris.’ Octavius CÆsar at thirty-two is described by Mark Antony after the battle of Actium as the ‘boy CÆsar’ who ‘wears the rose of youth’ (Antony and Cleopatra, III. ii. 17 seq.) Spenser in his Astrophel apostrophises Sir Philip Sidney on his death near the close of his thirty-second year as ‘oh wretched boy’ (l. 133) and ‘luckless boy’ (l. 142). Conversely it was a recognised convention among sonnetteers to exaggerate their own age. See p. 86, note. Two portraits, representing the Earl in early manhood, are at Welbeck Abbey, and are described above. Of the remaining seven paintings, two are assigned to Van Somer, and represent the Earl in early middle age; one, a half-length, a very charming picture, now belongs to James Knowles, Esq., of Queen Anne’s Lodge; the other, a full-length in drab doublet and hose, is in the Shakespeare Memorial Gallery at Stratford-on-Avon. Mireveldt twice painted the Earl at a later period of his career; one of the pictures is now at Woburn Abbey, the property of the Duke of Bedford, the other is at the National Portrait Gallery. A fifth picture, assigned to Mytens, belongs to Viscount Powerscourt; a sixth, by an unknown artist, belongs to Mr. Wingfield Digby, and the seventh (in armour) is in the Master’s Lodge at St. John’s College, Cambridge, where Southampton was educated. The miniature by Isaac Oliver, which also represents Southampton in late life, was formerly in Dr. Lumsden Propert’s collection. It now belongs to a collector at Hamburg. The two miniatures assigned to Peter Oliver belong respectively to Mr. Jeffery Whitehead and Sir Francis Cook, Bart. (Cf. Catalogue of Exhibition of Portrait Miniatures at the Burlington Fine Arts Club, London, 1889, pp. 32, 71, 100.) In all the best preserved of these portraits the eyes are blue and the hair a dark shade of auburn. Among the middle-life portraits Southampton appears to best advantage in the one by Van Somer belonging to Mr. James Knowles. I describe these pictures from a personal inspection of them which the Duke kindly permitted me to make. Cf. Shakespeare’s Sonnet iii.:
Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime.
Southampton’s singularly long hair procured him at times unwelcome attentions. When, in January 1598, he struck Ambrose Willoughby, an esquire of the body, for asking him to break off owing to the lateness of the hour, a game of primero that he was playing in the royal chamber at Whitehall, the esquire Willoughby is stated to have retaliated by ‘pulling off some of the Earl’s locks.’ On the incident being reported to the Queen, she ‘gave Willoughby, in the presence, thanks for what he did’ (Sydney Papers, ii. 83). These quotations are from Sorrowes Joy, a collection of elegies on Queen Elizabeth by Cambridge writers (Cambridge, 1603), and from Chettle’s England’s Mourning Garment, London, 1603). Gervase Markham’s Honour in her Perfection, 1624. Manningham’s Diary, Camden Soc., p. 148. Court and Times of James I, I. i. 7. See Appendix IV. The fine exordium of Sonnet cxix.:
What potions have I drunk of Siren tears,
Distill’d from limbecks foul as hell within,
adopts expressions in Barnes’s vituperative sonnet (No xlix.), where, after denouncing his mistress as a ‘siren,’ the poet incoherently ejaculates:
From my love’s limbeck [sc. have I] still [di]stilled tears!
Almost every note in the scale of sadness or self-reproach is sounded from time to time in Petrarch’s sonnets. Tasso in Scelta delle Rime, 1582, p. ii. p. 26, has a sonnet (beginning ‘Vinca fortuna homai, se sotto il peso’) which adumbrates Shakespeare’s Sonnets xxix. (‘When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes’) and lxvi. (‘Tired with all these, for restful death I cry’). Drummond of Hawthornden translated Tasso’s sonnet in his sonnet (part i. No. xxxiii.); while Drummond’s Sonnets xxv. (‘What cruel star into this world was brought’) and xxxii. (‘If crost with all mishaps be my poor life’) are pitched in the identical key. Sidney’s Certain Sonnets (No. xiii.) appended to Astrophel and Stella in the edition of 1598. In Emaricdulfe: Sonnets written by E. C., 1595, Sonnet xxxvii. beginning ‘O lust, of sacred love the foul corrupter,’ even more closely resembles Shakespeare’s sonnet in both phraseology and sentiment. E. C.’s rare volume is reprinted in the Lamport Garland (Roxburghe Club), 1881. Even this sonnet is adapted from Drayton. See Sonnet xxii. in 1599 edition:
An evil spirit your beauty haunts me still . . .
Thus am I still provoked to every evil
By this good-wicked spirit, sweet Angel-Devil.
But Shakespeare entirely alters the point of the lines by contrasting the influence exerted on him by the woman with that exerted on him by a man. The work was reprinted by Dr. Grosart in his Occasional Issues, 1880, and extracts from it appear in the New Shakspere Society’s ‘Allusion Books,’ i. 169 seq. W. S. are common initials, and at least two authors bearing them made some reputation in Shakespeare’s day. There was a dramatist named Wentworth Smith (see p. 180 infra), and there was a William Smith who published a volume of lovelorn sonnets called Chloris in 1595. A specious argument might possibly be devised in favour of the latter’s identity with Willobie’s counsellor. But Shakespeare, of the two, has the better claim. No edition appeared before 1600, and then two were published. Oberon’s Vision, by the Rev. W. J. Halpin (Shakespeare Society), 1843. Two accounts of the Kenilworth fÊtes, by George Gascoigne and Robert Laneham respectively, were published in 1576. Reprinted by the Shakespeare Society in 1844. All these details are of Shakespeare’s invention, and do not figure in the old play. But in the crude induction in the old play the nondescript drunkard is named without prefix ‘Slie.’ That surname, although it was very common at Stratford and in the neighbourhood, was borne by residents in many other parts of the country, and its appearance in the old play is not in itself, as has been suggested, sufficient to prove that the old play was written by a Warwickshire man. There are no other names or references in the old play that can be associated with Warwickshire. Mr. Richard Savage, the secretary and librarian of the Birthplace Trustees at Stratford, has generously placed at my disposal this interesting fact, which he lately discovered.
It was licensed for publication in 1594, and published in 1598. The quarto of 1600 reads Woncote: all the folios read Woncot. Yet Malone in the Variorum of 1803 introduced the new and unwarranted reading of Wincot, which has been unwisely adopted by succeeding editors. These references are convincingly explained by Mr. Justice Madden in his Diary of Master Silence, pp. 87 seq., 372-4. Cf. Blunt’s Dursley and its Neighbourhood, Huntley’s Glossary of the Cotswold Dialect, and Marshall’s Rural Economy of Cotswold (1796). First adopted by Theobald in 1733; cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 257. Remarks, p. 295. Cf. Shakespeare Society’s reprint, 1842, ed. Halliwell. This collection of stories is said by both Malone and Steevens to have been published in 1603, although no edition earlier than 1620 is now known. The 1620 edition of Westward for Smelts, written by Kinde Kit of Kingston, was reprinted by the Percy Society in 1848. Cf. Shakespeare’s Library, ed. Hazlitt, I. ii. 1-80. Diary, p. 61; see p. 167. Nichols, Progresses of Elizabeth, iii. 552. Cf. Domestic MSS. (Elizabeth) in Public Record Office, vol. cclxxviii. Nos. 78 and 85; and Calendar of Domestic State Papers, 1598-1601, pp. 575-8. Cf. Gilchrist, Examination of the charges . . . of Jonson’s Enmity towards Shakspeare, 1808. Latten is a mixed metal resembling brass. Pistol in Merry Wives of Windsor (I. i. 165) likens Slender to a ‘latten bilbo,’ that is, a sword made of the mixed metal. Cf. Anecdotes and Traditions, edited from L’Estrange’s MSS. by W. J. Thoms for the Camden Society, p. 2. This, or some synonym, is the conventional epithet applied at the date to Shakespeare and his work. Weever credited such characters of Shakespeare as Tarquin, Romeo, and Richard III with ‘sugred tongues’ in his Epigrams of 1595. In the Return from Parnassus (1601?) Shakespeare is apostrophised as ‘sweet Master Shakespeare.’ Milton did homage to the tradition by writing of ‘sweetest Shakespeare’ in L’Allegro. A hack-writer, Wentworth Smith, took a hand in producing thirteen plays, none of which are extant, for the theatrical manager, Philip Henslowe, between 1601 and 1603. The Hector of Germanie, an extant play ‘made by W. Smith’ and published ‘with new additions’ in 1615, was doubtless by Wentworth Smith, and is the only dramatic work by him that has survived. Neither internal nor external evidence confirms the theory that the above-mentioned six plays, which have been wrongly claimed for Shakespeare, were really by Wentworth Smith. The use of the initials ‘W.S.’ was not due to the publishers’ belief that Wentworth Smith was the author, but to their endeavour to delude their customers into a belief that the plays were by Shakespeare. Cf. p. 258 infra. There were twenty pieces in all. The five by Shakespeare are placed in the order i. ii. iii. v. xvi. Of the remainder, two—‘If music and sweet poetry agree’ (No. viii.) and ‘As it fell upon a day’ (No. xx.)—were borrowed from Barnfield’s Poems in divers Humours (1598). ‘Venus with Adonis sitting by her’ (No. xi.) is from Bartholomew Griffin’s Fidessa (1596); ‘My flocks feed not’ (No. xvii.) is adapted from Thomas Weelkes’s Madrigals (1597); ‘Live with me and be my love’ is by Marlowe; and the appended stanza, entitled ‘Love’s Answer,’ by Sir Walter Ralegh (No. xix.); ‘Crabbed age and youth cannot live together’ (No. xii.) is a popular song often quoted by the Elizabethan dramatists. Nothing has been ascertained of the origin and history of the remaining nine poems (iv. vi. vii. ix. x. xiii. xiv. xviii.) A unique copy of Chester’s Love’s Martyr is in Mr. Christie-Miller’s library at Britwell. Of a reissue of the original edition in 1611 with a new title, The Annals of Great Brittaine, a copy (also unique) is in the British Museum. A reprint of the original edition was prepared for private circulation by Dr. Grosart in 1878, in his series of ‘Occasional Issues.’ It was also printed in the same year as one of the publications of the New Shakspere Society. Matthew Roydon in his elegy on Sir Philip Sidney, appended to Spenser’s Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, 1595, describes the part figuratively played in Sidney’s obsequies by the turtle-dove, swan, phoenix, and eagle, in verses that very closely resemble Shakespeare’s account of the funereal functions fulfilled by the same four birds in his contribution to Chester’s volume. This resemblance suggests that Shakespeare’s poem may be a fanciful adaptation of Roydon’s elegiac conceits without ulterior significance. Shakespeare’s concluding ‘Threnos’ is imitated in metre and phraseology by Fletcher in his Mad Lover in the song ‘The Lover’s Legacy to his Cruel Mistress.’ Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 186. There is an admirable discussion of the question involved in the poet’s heraldry in Herald and Genealogist, i. 510. Facsimiles of all the documents preserved in the College of Arms are given in Miscellanea Genealogica et Heraldica, 2nd ser. 1886, i. 109. Halliwell-Phillipps prints imperfectly one of the 1596 draft-grants, and that of 1599 (Outlines, ii. 56, 60), but does not distinguish the character of the negotiation of the earlier year from that of the negotiation of the later year. It is still customary at the College of Arms to inform an applicant for a coat-of-arms who has a father alive that the application should be made in the father’s name, and the transaction conducted as if the father were the principal. It was doubtless on advice of this kind that Shakespeare was acting in the negotiations that are described below. In a manuscript in the British Museum (Harl. MS. 6140, f. 45) is a copy of the tricking of the arms of William ‘Shakspere,’ which is described ‘as a pattent per Will’m Dethike Garter, principale King of Armes;’ this is figured in French’s Shakespeareana Genealogica, p. 524. These memoranda, which were as follows, were first written without the words here enclosed in brackets; those words were afterwards interlineated in the manuscript in a hand similar to that of the original sentences:
‘[This John shoeth] A patierne therof under Clarent Cookes hand in paper. xx. years past. [The Q. officer and cheffe of the towne]
[A Justice of peace] And was a Baylife of Stratford uppo Avon xv. or xvj. years past.
That he hathe lands and tenements of good wealth and substance [500 li.]
That he mar[ried a daughter and heyre of Arden, a gent. of worship.]’
‘An exemplification’ was invariably secured more easily than a new grant of arms. The heralds might, if they chose, tacitly accept, without examination, the applicant’s statement that his family had borne arms long ago, and they thereby regarded themselves as relieved of the obligation of close inquiry into his present status. On the gravestone of John Hall, Shakespeare’s elder son-in-law, the Shakespeare arms are similarly impaled with those of Hall. French, Genealogica Shakespeareana, p. 413. The details of Brooke’s accusation are not extant, and are only to be deduced from the answer of Garter and Clarenceux to Brooke’s complaint, two copies of which are accessible: one is in the vol. W-Z at the Heralds’ College, f. 276; and the other, slightly differing, is in Ashmole MS. 846, ix. f. 50. Both are printed in the Herald and Genealogist, i. 514. Notes and Queries, 8th ser. v. 478. The tradition that Shakespeare planted the mulberry tree was not put on record till it was cut down in 1758. In 1760 mention is made of it in a letter of thanks in the corporation’s archives from the Steward of the Court of Record to the corporation of Stratford for presenting him with a standish made from the wood. But, according to the testimony of old inhabitants confided to Malone (cf. his Life of Shakespeare, 1790, p. 118), the legend had been orally current in Stratford since Shakespeare’s lifetime. The tree was perhaps planted in 1609, when a Frenchman named Veron distributed a number of young mulberry trees through the midland counties by order of James I, who desired to encourage the culture of silkworms (cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 134, 411-16). I do not think we shall over-estimate the present value of Shakespeare’s income if we multiply each of its items by eight, but it is difficult to state authoritatively the ratio between the value of money in Shakespeare’s time and in our own. The money value of corn then and now is nearly identical; but other necessaries of life—meat, milk, eggs, wool, building materials, and the like—were by comparison ludicrously cheap in Shakespeare’s day. If we strike the average between the low price of these commodities and the comparatively high price of corn, the average price of necessaries will be found to be in Shakespeare’s day about an eighth of what it is now. The cost of luxuries is also now about eight times the price that it was in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. Sixpence was the usual price of a new quarto or octavo book such as would now be sold at prices ranging between three shillings and sixpence and six shillings. Half a crown was charged for the best-placed seats in the best theatres. The purchasing power of one Elizabethan pound might be generally defined in regard to both necessaries and luxuries as equivalent to that of eight pounds of the present currency. Cf. Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Collier, pp. xxviii seq. After the Restoration the receipts at the third performance were given for the author’s ‘benefit.’ Return from Parnassus, V. i. 10-16. Cf. H[enry] P[arrot]’s Laquei Ridiculosi or Springes for Woodcocks, 1613, Epigram No. 131, headed ‘Theatrum Licencia:’
Cotta’s become a player most men know,
And will no longer take such toyling paines;
For here’s the spring (saith he) whence pleasures flow
And brings them damnable excessive gaines:
That now are cedars growne from shrubs and sprigs,
Since Greene’s Tu Quoque and those Garlicke Jigs.
Greens Tu Quoque was a popular comedy that had once been performed at Court by the Queen’s players, and ‘Garlicke Jigs’ alluded derisively to drolling entertainments, interspersed with dances, which won much esteem from patrons of the smaller playhouses. The documents which are now in the Public Record Office among the papers relating to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, were printed in full by Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 312-19. In 1613 Robert Daborne, a playwright of insignificant reputation, charged for a drama as much as £25. Alleyn Papers, ed. Collier, p. 65. Ten pounds was the ordinary fee paid to actors for a performance at the Court of James I. Shakespeare’s company appeared annually twenty times and more at Whitehall during the early years of James I’s reign, and Shakespeare, as being both author and actor, doubtless received a larger share of the receipts than his colleagues. Cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 312-19; Fleay, Stage, pp. 324-8 Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 17-19. See p. 195. Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 77-80. Accounts of the Revels, ed. Peter Cunningham (Shakespeare Society), p. 177; Variorum Shakespeare, 1821, iii. 406. It was reproduced by the Hakluyt Society to accompany The Voyages and Workes of John Davis the Navigator, ed. Captain A. H. Markham, 1880. Cf. Mr. Coote’s note on the New Map, lxxxv-xcv. A paper on the subject by Mr. Coote also appears in New Shakspere Society’s Transactions, 1877-9, pt. i. 88-100. Diary, Camden Soc. p. 18; the Elizabethan Stage Society repeated the play on the same stage on February 10, 11 and 12, 1897. Bandello’s Novelle, ii. 36. First published in 1579; 2nd edit. 1595. Hamlet, III. ii. 109-10. On December 31, 1601, the Lords of the Council sent letters to the Lord Mayor of London and to the magistrates of Surrey and Middlesex expressing their surprise that no steps had yet been taken to limit the number of playhouses in accordance with ‘our order set down and prescribed about a year and a half since.’ But nothing followed, and no more was heard officially of the Council’s order until 1619, when the Corporation of London remarked on its practical abrogation at the same time as they directed the suppression (which was not carried out) of the Blackfriars Theatre. All the documents on this subject are printed from the Privy Council Register by Halliwell-Phillipps, 307-9. The passage, act ii. sc. ii. 348-394, which deals in ample detail with the subject, only appears in the folio version of 1623. In the First Quarto a very curt reference is made to the misfortunes of the ‘tragedians of the city:’
‘Y’ faith, my lord, noveltie carries it away,
For the principal publike audience that
Came to them are turned to private playes
And to the humours of children.’
‘Private playes’ were plays acted by amateurs, with whom the ‘Children’ might well be classed. All recent commentators follow Steevens in interpreting the ‘late innovation’ as the Order of the Privy Council of June 1600, restricting the number of the London playhouses to two; but that order, which was never put in force, in no way affected the actors’ fortunes. The First Quarto’s reference to the perils attaching to the ‘noveltie’ of the boys’ performances indicates the true meaning. Hamlet, II. ii. 349-64. At the moment offensive personalities seemed to have infected all the London theatres. On May 10, 1601, the Privy Council called the attention of the Middlesex magistrates to the abuse covertly levelled by the actors of the ‘Curtain’ at gentlemen ‘of good desert and quality,’ and directed the magistrates to examine all plays before they were produced (Privy Council Register). Jonson subsequently issued an ‘apologetical dialogue’ (appended to printed copies of the Poetaster), in which he somewhat truculently qualified his hostility to the players:
‘Now for the players ’tis true I tax’d them
And yet but some, and those so sparingly
As all the rest might have sat still unquestioned,
Had they but had the wit or conscience
To think well of themselves. But impotent they
Thought each man’s vice belonged to their whole tribe;
And much good do it them. What they have done against me
I am not moved with, if it gave them meat
Or got them clothes, ’tis well; that was their end,
Only amongst them I am sorry for
Some better natures by the rest so drawn
To run in that vile line.’
See p. 229, note I, ad fin. The proposed identification of Virgil in the ‘Poetaster’ with Chapman has little to recommend it. Chapman’s literary work did not justify the commendations which were bestowed on Virgil in the play. The most scornful criticism that Jonson is known to have passed on any composition by Shakespeare was aimed at a passage in Julius CÆsar, and as Jonson’s attack is barely justifiable on literary grounds, it is fair to assume that the play was distasteful to him from other considerations. ‘Many times,’ Jonson wrote of Shakespeare in his Timber, ‘hee fell into those things [which] could not escape laughter: As when hee said in the person of CÆsar, one speaking to him [i.e. CÆsar]; CÆsar, thou dost me wrong. Hee [i.e. CÆsar] replyed: CÆsar did never wrong, butt with just cause: and such like, which were ridiculous.’ Jonson derisively quoted the same passage in the induction to The Staple of News (1625): ‘Cry you mercy, you did not wrong but with just cause.’ Possibly the words that were ascribed by Jonson to Shakespeare’s character of CÆsar appeared in the original version of the play, but owing perhaps to Jonson’s captious criticism they do not figure in the Folio version, the sole version that has reached us. The only words there that correspond with Jonson’s quotation are CÆsar’s remark:
Know, CÆsar doth not wrong, nor without cause
Will he be satisfied
(III. i. 47-8). The rhythm and sense seem to require the reinsertion after the word ‘wrong’ of the phrase ‘but with just cause,’ which Jonson needlessly reprobated. Leonard Digges (1588-1635), one of Shakespeare’s admiring critics, emphasises the superior popularity of Shakespeare’s Julius CÆsar in the theatre to Ben Jonson’s Roman play of Catiline, in his eulogistic lines on Shakespeare (published after Digges’s death in the 1640 edition of Shakespeare’s Poems):
So have I seen when CÆsar would appear,
And on the stage at half-sword parley were
Brutus and Cassius—oh, how the audience
Were ravish’d, with what wonder they went thence
When some new day they would not brook a line
Of tedious, though well laboured, Catiline.
I wrote on this point in the article on Thomas Kyd in the Dictionary of National Biography (vol. xxxi.): ‘The argument in favour of Kyd’s authorship of a pre-Shakespearean play (now lost) on the subject of Hamlet deserves attention. Nash in 1589, when describing [in his preface to Menaphon] the typical literary hack, who at almost every point suggests Kyd, notices that in addition to his other accomplishments “he will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of tragical speeches.” Other references in popular tracts and plays of like date prove that in an early tragedy concerning Hamlet there was a ghost who cried repeatedly, “Hamlet, revenge!” and that this expression took rank in Elizabethan slang beside the vernacular quotations from [Kyd’s sanguinary tragedy of] Jeronimo, such as “What outcry calls me from my naked bed,” and “Beware, Hieronimo, go by, go by.” The resemblance between the stories of Hamlet and Jeronimo suggests that the former would have supplied Kyd with a congenial plot. In Jeronimo a father seeks to avenge his son’s murder; in Hamlet the theme is the same with the position of father and son reversed. In Jeronimo the avenging father resolves to reach his end by arranging for the performance of a play in the presence of those whom he suspects of the murder of his son, and there is good ground for crediting the lost tragedy of Hamlet with a similar play-scene. Shakespeare’s debt to the lost tragedy is a matter of conjecture, but the stilted speeches of the play-scene in his Hamlet read like intentional parodies of Kyd’s bombastic efforts in The Spanish Tragedy, and it is quite possible that they were directly suggested by an almost identical episode in a lost Hamlet by the same author.’ Shakespeare elsewhere shows acquaintance with Kyd’s work. He places in the mouth of Kit Sly in the Taming of the Shrew the current phrase ‘Go by, Jeronimy,’ from The Spanish Tragedy. Shakespeare quotes verbatim a line from the same piece in Much Ado about Nothing (I. i. 271): ‘In time the savage bull doth bear the yoke;’ but Kyd practically borrowed that line from Watson’s Passionate Centurie (No. xlvii.), where Shakespeare may have met it. Cf. Gericke and Max Moltke, Hamlet-Quellen, Leipzig, 1881. The story was absorbed into Scandinavian mythology: cf. Ambales-Saga, edited by Mr. Israel Gollancz, 1898. Cf. Hamlet—parallel texts of the first and second quarto, and first folio—ed. Wilhelm Vietor, Marburg, 1891; The Devonshire Hamlets, 1860, parallel texts of the two quartos edited by Mr. Sam Timmins; Hamlet, ed. George Macdonald, 1885, a study with the text of the folio. Arber’s Transcript of the Stationers’ Registers, iii. 226. Ib. iii. 400. Less satisfactory is the endeavour that has been made by Mr. F. G. Fleay and Mr. George Wyndham to treat Troilus and Cressida as Shakespeare’s contribution to the embittered controversy of 1601-2, between Jonson on the one hand and Marston and Dekker and their actor friends on the other hand, and to represent the play as a pronouncement against Jonson. According to this fanciful view, Shakespeare held up Jonson to savage ridicule in Ajax, while in Thersites he denounced Marston, despite Marston’s intermittent antagonism to Jonson, which entitled him to freedom from attack by Jonson’s foes. The appearance of the word ‘mastic’ in the line (1. iii. 73) ‘When rank Thersites opes his mastic jaws’ is treated as proof of Shakespeare’s identification of Thersites with Marston, who used the pseudonym ‘Therio-mastix’ in his Scourge of Villainy. It would be as reasonable to identify him with Dekker, who wrote the greater part of Satiro-mastix. ‘Mastic’ is doubtless an adjective formed without recondite significance from the substantive ‘mastic,’ i.e. the gum commonly used at the time for stopping decayed teeth. No hypothesis of a polemical intention is needed to account for Shakespeare’s conception of Ajax or Thersites. There is no trait in either character as depicted by Shakespeare which a reading of Chapman’s Homer would fail to suggest. The controversial interpretation of the play is in conflict with chronology (for Troilus cannot, on any showing, be assigned to the period of the war between Jonson and Dekker, in 1601-2), and it seems confuted by the facts and arguments already adduced in the discussion of the theatrical conflict (see pp. 213-219). If more direct disproof be needed, it may be found in Shakespeare’s prologue to Troilus, where there is a good-humoured and expressly pacific allusion to the polemical aims of Jonson’s Poetaster. Jonson had introduced into his play ‘an armed prologue’ on account, he asserted, of his enemies’ menaces. Shakespeare, after describing in his prologue to Troilus the progress of the Trojan war before his story opened, added that his ‘prologue’ presented itself ‘arm’d,’ not to champion ‘author’s pen or actor’s voice,’ but simply to announce in a guise befitting the warlike subject-matter that the play began in the middle of the conflict between Greek and Trojan, and not at the beginning. These words of Shakespeare put out of court any interpretation of Shakespeare’s play that would represent it as a contribution to the theatrical controversy. England’s Mourning Garment, 1603, sign. D. 3. At the same time the Earl of Worcester’s company was taken into the Queen’s patronage, and its members were known as ‘the Queen’s servants,’ while the Earl of Nottingham’s company was taken into the patronage of the Prince of Wales, and its members were known as the Prince’s servants. This extended patronage of actors by the royal family was noticed as especially honourable to the King by one of his contemporary panegyrists, Gilbert Dugdale, in his Time Triumphant, 1604, sig. B. The entry, which appears in the accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber, was first printed in 1842 in Cunningham’s Extracts from the Accounts of the Revels at Court, p. xxxiv. A comparison of Cunningham’s transcript with the original in the Public Record Office (Audit Office—Declared Accounts—Treasurer of the Chamber, bundle 388, roll 41) shows that it is accurate. The Earl of Pembroke was in no way responsible for the performance at Wilton House. At the time, the Court was formally installed in his house (cf. Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1603-10) pp. 47-59), and the Court officers commissioned the players to perform there, and paid all their expenses. The alleged tradition, recently promulgated for the first time by the owners of Wilton, that As You Like It was performed on the occasion, is unsupported by contemporary evidence. The grant is transcribed in the New Shakspere Society’s Transactions, 1877-9, Appendix ii., from the Lord Chamberlain’s papers in the Public Record Office, where it is now numbered 660. The number allotted it in the Transactions is obsolete. A contemporary copy of this letter, which declared the Queen’s players acting at the Fortune and the Prince’s players at the Curtain to be entitled to the same privileges as the King’s players, is at Dulwich College (cf. G. F. Warner’s Catalogue of the Dulwich Manuscripts, pp. 26-7). Collier printed it in his New Facts with fraudulent additions, in which the names of Shakespeare and other actors figured. Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps in his Outlines, i. 213, cites a royal order to this effect, but gives no authority, and I have sought in vain for the document at the Public Record Office, at the British Museum, and elsewhere. But there is no reason to doubt the fact that Shakespeare and his fellow-actors took, as Grooms of the Chamber, part in the ceremonies attending the Constable’s visit to London. In the unprinted accounts of Edmund Tilney, master of the revels, for the year October 1603 to October 1604, charge is made for his three days’ attendance with four men to direct the entertainments ‘at the receaving of the Constable of Spayne’ (Public Record Office, Declared Accounts, Pipe Office Roll 2805). The magnificent festivities culminated in a splendid banquet given in the Constable’s honour by James I at Whitehall on Sunday, August 19/29—the day on which the treaty was signed. In the morning all the members of the royal household accompanied the Constable in formal procession from Somerset House. After the banquet, at which the earls of Pembroke and Southampton acted as stewards, there was a ball, and the King’s guests subsequently witnessed exhibitions of bear baiting, bull baiting, rope dancing, and feats of horsemanship. (Cf. Stow’s Chronicle, 1631, pp. 845-6, and a Spanish pamphlet, Relacion de la jornada del excmo Condestabile de Castilla, etc., Antwerp, 1604, 4to, which was summarised in Ellis’s Original Letters, 2nd series, vol. iii. pp. 207-215, and was partly translated in Mr. W. B. Rye’s England as seen by Foreigners, pp. 117-124).
At the Bodleian Library (MS. Rawlinson, A 204) are the original accounts of Lord Stanhope of Harrington, Treasurer of the Chamber for various (detached) years in the early part of James I’s reign. These documents show that Shakespeare’s company acted at Court on November 1 and 4, December 26 and 28, 1604, and on January 7 and 8, February 2 and 3, and the evenings of the following Shrove Sunday, Shrove Monday, and Shrove Tuesday, 1605. These dates are drawn from a memorandum of plays performed at Court in 1604 and 1605 which is among Malone’s manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, and was obviously derived by Malone from authentic documents that were in his day preserved at the Audit Office in Somerset House. The document cannot now be traced at the Public Record Office, whither the Audit Office papers have been removed since Malone’s death. Peter Cunningham professed to print the original document in his accounts of the revels at Court (Shakespeare Society, 1842, pp. 203 et seq.), but there is no doubt that he forged his so-called transcript, and that the additions which he made to Malone’s memorandum were the outcome of his fancy. Collier’s assertion in his New Particulars, p. 57, that Othello was first acted at Sir Thomas Egerton’s residence at Harefield on August 6, 1602, was based solely on a document among the Earl of Ellesmere’s MSS. at Bridgwater House, which purported to be a contemporary account by the clerk, Sir Arthur Maynwaring, of Sir Thomas Egerton’s household expenses. This document, which Collier reprinted in his Egerton Papers (Camden Soc.), p. 343, was authoritatively pronounced by experts in 1860 to be ‘a shameful forgery’ (cf. Ingleby’s Complete View of the Shakspere Controversy, 1861, pp. 261-5). Dr. Garnett’s Italian Literature, 1898, p. 227. Cf. Letter by Mrs. Stopes in AthenÆum, July 25, 1896. Cf. Macbeth, ed. Clark and Wright, Clarendon Press Series. This fact is stated on the title-page of the quartos. Sidney tells the story in a chapter entitled ‘The pitiful state and story of the Paphlagonian unkind king and his blind son; first related by the son, then by his blind father’ (bk. ii. chap. 10, ed. 1590 4to; pp. 132-3, ed. 1674, fol.) It was edited for the Shakespeare Society in 1842 by Dyce, who owned the manuscript. Mr. George Wyndham in his introduction to his edition of North’s Plutarch, i. pp. xciii-c, gives an excellent criticism of the relations of Shakespeare’s play to Plutarch’s life of Antonius. See the whole of Coriolanus’s great speech on offering his services to Aufidius, the Volscian general, IV. v. 71-107:
My name is Caius Marcius, who hath done
To thee particularly and to all the Volsces,
Great hurt and mischief; thereto witness may
My surname, Coriolanus . . . to do thee service.
North’s translation of Plutarch gives in almost the same terms Coriolanus’s speech on the occasion. It opens: ‘I am Caius Martius, who hath done to thyself particularly, and to all the Volsces generally, great hurt and mischief, which I cannot deny for my surname of Coriolanus that I bear.’ Similarly Volumnia’s stirring appeal to her son and her son’s proffer of submission, in act V. sc. iii. 94-193, reproduce with equal literalness North’s rendering of Plutarch. ‘If we held our peace, my son,’ Volumnia begins in North, ‘the state of our raiment would easily betray to thee what life we have led at home since thy exile and abode abroad; but think now with thyself,’ and so on. The first sentence of Shakespeare’s speech runs:
Should we be silent and not speak, our raiment
And state of bodies would bewray what life
We have led since thy exile. Think with thyself . . .
See p. 172 and note 2. In I. i. 136-7 Imogen is described as ‘past grace’ in the theological sense. In I. ii. 30-31 the Second Lord remarks: ‘If it be a sin to make a true election, she is damned.’ See p. 255, note I. Camillo’s reflections (I. ii. 358) on the ruin that attends those who ‘struck anointed kings’ have been regarded, not quite conclusively, as specially designed to gratify James I. Conversations with Drummond, p. 16. In Winter’s Tale (IV. iv. 760 et seq.) Autolycus threatens that the clown’s son ‘shall be flayed alive; then ‘nointed over with honey, set on the head of a wasp’s nest,’ &c. In Boccaccio’s story the villain Ambrogiuolo (Shakespeare’s Iachimo), after ‘being bounden to the stake and anointed with honey,’ was ‘to his exceeding torment not only slain but devoured of the flies and wasps and gadflies wherewith that country abounded’ (cf. Decameron, translated by John Payne, 1893, i. 164). Printed in Cohn’s Shakespeare in Germany. Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, edit. 1612, p. 82 b. The passage begins:
Ye ayres and windes, ye elves of hills, ye brookes and woods alone.
Variorum Shakespeare, 1821, xv. 423. In the early weeks of 1611 Shakespeare’s company presented no fewer than fifteen plays at Court. Payment of £150 was made to the actors for their services on February 12, 1610-11. The council’s warrant is extant in the Bodleian Library MS. Rawl. A 204 (f. 305). The plays performed were not specified by name, but some by Shakespeare were beyond doubt amongst them, and possibly ‘The Tempest.’ A forged page which was inserted in a detached account-book of the Master of the Court-Revels for the years 1611 and 1612 at the Public Record Office, and was printed as genuine in Peter Cunningham’s Extracts from the Revels’ Accounts, p. 210, supplies among other entries two to the effect that ‘The Tempest’ was performed at Whitehall at Hallowmas (i.e. November 1) 1611 and that ‘A Winter’s Tale’ followed four days later, on November 5. Though these entries are fictitious, the information they offer may be true. Malone doubtless based his positive statement respecting the date of the composition of ‘The Tempest’ in 1611 on memoranda made from papers then accessible at the Audit Office, but now, since the removal of those archives to the Public Record Office, mislaid. All the forgeries introduced into the Revels’ accounts are well considered and show expert knowledge (see p. 235, note I). The forger of the 1612 entries probably worked either on the published statement of Malone, or on fuller memoranda left by him among his voluminous manuscripts. Cf. Universal Review, April 1889, article by Dr. Richard Garnett. Harmonised scores of Johnson’s airs for the songs ‘Full Fathom Five’ and ‘Where the Bee sucks,’ are preserved in Wilson’s Cheerful Ayres or Ballads set for three voices, 1660. Cf. Browning, Caliban upon Setebos; Daniel Wilson, Caliban, or the Missing Link (1873); and Renan, Caliban (1878), a drama continuing Shakespeare’s play. When Shakespeare wrote Troilus and Cressida he had formed some conception of a character of the Caliban type. Thersites say of Ajax (III. iii. 264), ‘He’s grown a very land-fish, languageless, a monster.’ Treasurer’s accounts in Rawl. MS. A 239, leaf 47 (in the Bodleian), printed in New Shakspere Society’s Transactions, 1895-6, part ii. p. 419. The Merry Devill of Edmonton, a comedy which was first published in 1608, was also re-entered by Moseley for publication on September 9, 1653, as the work of Shakespeare (see p. 181 supra). Dyce thought he detected traces of Shirley’s workmanship, but it was possibly Theobald’s unaided invention. The 1634 quarto of the play was carefully edited for the New Shakspere Society by Mr. Harold Littledale in 1876. See also Spalding, Shakespeare’s Authorship of ‘Two Noble Kinsmen,’ 1833, reprinted by New Shakspere Society, 1876; article by Spalding in Edinburgh Review, 1847; Transactions, New Shakspere Society, 1874. Cf. Mr. Robert Boyle in Transactions of the New Shakspere Society, 1882. ReliquiÆ WottonianÆ, 1675, pp. 425-6. Wotton adds ‘that the piece was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of Pomp and Majesty, even to the matting of the Stage; the Knights of the Order, with their Georges and Garters, the Guards with their embroidered Coats, and the like: sufficient in truth within a while to make greatness very familiar, if not ridiculous. Now King Henry making a Masque at the Cardinal Wolsey’s House, and certain Canons being shot off at his entry, some of the paper or other stuff wherewith one of them was stopped, did light on the Thatch, where being thought at first but an idle Smoak, and their eyes more attentive to the show, it kindled inwardly, and ran round like a train, consuming within less than an hour the whole House to the very grounds. This was the fatal period of that vertuous fabrique; wherein yet nothing did perish, but wood and straw and a few forsaken cloaks; only one man had his breeches set on fire, that would perhaps have broyled him, if he had not by the benefit of a provident wit put it out with bottle[d] ale.’ John Chamberlain writing to Sir Ralph Winwood on July 8, 1613, briefly mentions that the theatre was burnt to the ground in less than two hours owing to the accidental ignition of the thatch roof through the firing of cannon ‘to be used in the play.’ The audience escaped unhurt though they had ‘but two narrow doors to get out’ (Winwood’s Memorials, iii. p. 469). A similar account was sent by the Rev. Thomas Lorkin to Sir Thomas Puckering, Bart., from London, June 30, 1613. ‘The fire broke out,’ Lorkin wrote, ‘no longer since than yesterday, while Burbage’s company were acting at the Globe the play of Henry VIII’ (Court and Times of James I, 1848, vol. i. p. 253). A contemporary sonnet on ‘the pittifull burning of the Globe playhouse in London,’ first printed by Haslewood ‘from an old manuscript volume of poems’ in the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1816, was again printed by Halliwell-Phillipps (i. pp. 310, 311) from an authentic manuscript in the library of Sir Matthew Wilson, Bart., of Eshton Hall, Yorkshire. Bodl. MS. Rawl. A 239; cf. Spedding in Gentleman’s Magazine, 1850, reprinted in New Shakspere Society’s Transactions, 1874. Cf. Mr. Robert Boyle in New Shakspere Society’s Transactions, 1884. Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 87. Manningham, Diary, March 23, 1601, Camd. Soc. p. 39. Cf. Aubrey, Lives; Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 43; and art. Sir William D’Avenant in the Dictionary of National Biography. The indenture prepared for the purchaser is in the Halliwell-Phillipps collection, which was sold to Mr. Marsden J. Perry of Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.A., in January 1897. That held by the vendor is in the Guildhall Library. Shakespeare’s references to puritans in the plays of his middle and late life are so uniformly discourteous that they must be judged to reflect his personal feeling. The discussion between Maria and Sir Andrew Aguecheek regarding Malvolio’s character in Twelfth Night (II. iii. 153 et seq.) runs:
Maria. Marry, sir, sometimes he is a kind of puritan.
Sir Andrew. O! if I thought that, I’d beat him like a dog.
Sir Toby. What, for being a puritan? thy exquisite reason, dear knight.
Sir Andrew. I have no exquisite reason for ‘t, but I have reason good enough.
In Winter’s Tale (IV. iii. 46) the Clown, after making contemptuous references to the character of the shearers, remarks that there is ‘but one puritan amongst them, and he sings psalms to hornpipes.’ Cf. the allusions to ‘grace’ and ‘election’ in Cymbeline, p. 250, note 1. The town council of Stratford-on-Avon, whose meeting-chamber almost overlooked Shakespeare’s residence of New Place, gave curious proof of their puritanic suspicion of the drama on February 7, 1612, when they passed a resolution that plays were unlawful and ‘the sufferance of them against the orders heretofore made and against the example of other well-governed cities and boroughs,’ and the council was therefore ‘content,’ the resolution ran, that ‘the penalty of xs. imposed [on players heretofore] be xli. henceforward.’ Ten years later the King’s players were bribed by the council to leave the city without playing. (See the present writer’s Stratford-on-Avon, p. 270.) The lines as quoted by Aubrey (Lives, ed. Clark, ii. 226) run:
Ten-in-the-hundred the Devil allows,
But Combe will have twelve he sweares and he vowes;
If any man ask, who lies in this tomb?
Oh! ho! quoth the Devil, ’tis my John-a-Combe.
Rowe’s version opens somewhat differently:
Ten-in-the-hundred lies here ingrav’d.
’Tis a hundred to ten, his soul is not sav’d.
The lines, in one form or another, seem to have been widely familiar in Shakespeare’s lifetime, but were not ascribed to him. The first two in Rowe’s version were printed in the epigrams by H[enry] P[arrot], 1608, and again in Camden’s Remaines, 1614. The whole first appeared in Richard Brathwaite’s Remains in 1618 under the heading: ‘Upon one John Combe of Stratford upon Aven, a notable Usurer, fastened upon a Tombe that he had Caused to be built in his Life Time.’ The clumsy entry runs: ‘Sept. Mr. Shakespeare tellyng J. Greene that I was not able to beare the encloseing of Welcombe.’ J. Greene is to be distinguished from Thomas Greene, the writer of the diary. The entry therefore implies that Shakespeare told J. Greene that the writer of the diary, Thomas Greene, was not able to bear the enclosure. Those who represent Shakespeare as a champion of popular rights have to read the ‘I’ in ‘I was not able’ as ‘he.’ Were that the correct reading, Shakespeare would be rightly credited with telling J. Greene that he disliked the enclosure; but palÆographers only recognise the reading ‘I.’ Cf. Shakespeare and the Enclosure of Common Fields at Welcombe, a facsimile of Greene’s diary, now at the Birthplace, Stratford, with a transcript by Mr. E. J. L. Scott, edited by Dr. C. M. Inglehy, 1885. British Magazine, June 1762. Cf. Malone, Shakespeare, 1821, ii. 500-2; Ireland, Confessions, 1805, p. 34; Green, Legend of the Crab Tree, 1857. The date is in the old style, and is equivalent to May 3 in the new; Cervantes, whose death is often described as simultaneous, died at Madrid ten days earlier—on April 13, in the old style, or April 23, 1616, in the new. Hall’s letter was published as a quarto pamphlet at London in 1884, from the original, now in the Bodleian Library Oxford. Mr. Charles Elton, Q.C., has been kind enough to give me a legal opinion on this point. He wrote to me on December 9, 1897: ‘I have looked to the authorities with my friend Mr. Herbert Mackay, and there is no doubt that Shakespeare barred the dower.’ Mr. Mackay’s opinion is couched in the following terms: ‘The conveyance of the Blackfriars estate to William Shakespeare in 1613 shows that the estate was conveyed to Shakespeare, Johnson, Jackson, and Hemming as joint tenants, and therefore the dower of Shakespeare’s wife would be barred unless he were the survivor of the four bargainees.’ That was a remote contingency, which did not arise, and Shakespeare always retained the power of making ‘another settlement when the trustees were shrinking.’ Thus the bar was for practical purposes perpetual, and disposes of Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps’s assertion that Shakespeare’s wife was entitled to dower in one form or another from all his real estate. Cf. Davidson on Conveyancing; Littleton, sect. 45; Coke upon Littleton, ed. Hargrave, p. 379 b, note I. A hundred and fifty pounds is described as a substantial jointure in Merry Wives, III. iii. 49. Leonard Digges, in commendatory verses before the First Folio of 1623, wrote that Shakespeare’s works would be alive
[When] Time dissolves thy Stratford monument.
Cf. Dugdale, Diary, 1827, p. 99; see under article on Bernard Janssen in the Dictionary of National Biography. ‘Timber,’ in Works, 1641. John Webster, the dramatist, made vague reference in the address before his ‘White Divel’ in 1612 to ‘the right happy and copious industry of M. Shakespeare, M. Decker, and M. Heywood.’ The words run: ‘Heere lyeth interred the bodye of Anne, wife of Mr. William Shakespeare, who depted. this life the 6th day of August, 1623, being of the age of 67 yeares.
‘Vbera, tu, mater, tu lac vitamq. dedisti,
Vae mihi; pro tanto munere saxa dabo!
Quam mallem, amoueat lapidem bonus Angel[us] ore,
Exeat ut Christi Corpus, imago tua.
Sed nil vota valent; venias cito, Christe; resurget,
Clausa licet tumulo, mater, et astra petet.’
Cf. Hall, Select Observations, ed. Cooke, 1657. Baker, Northamptonshire, i. 10; New Shaksp. Soc. Trans. 1880-5, pt. ii. pp. 13†—15†. Halliwell-Phillipps, Hist. of New Place, 1864, fol. Wise, Autograph of William Shakespeare . . . together with 4,000 ways of spelling the name, Philadelphia, 1869. See the article on John Florio in the Dictionary of National Biography, and Sir Frederick Madden’s Observations on an Autograph of Shakspere, 1838. Cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, New Lamps or Old, 1880; Malone, Inquiry, 1796. Mr. Lionel Cust, director of the National Portrait Gallery, who has ittle doubt of the genuineness of the picture, gave an interesting account of it at a meeting of the Society of Antiquaries on December 12, 1895. Mr. Cust’s paper is printed in the Society’s Proceedings, second series, vol. xvi. p. 42. Mr. Salt Brassington, the librarian of the Shakespeare Memorial Library, has given a careful description of it in the Illustrated Catalogue of the Pictures in the Memorial Gallery, 1896, pp. 78-83. Harper’s Magazine, May 1897. Cf. Evelyn’s Diary and Correspondence, iii. 444. Numberless portraits have been falsely identified with Shakespeare, and it would be futile to attempt to make the record of the pretended portraits complete. Upwards of sixty have been offered for sale to the National Portrait Gallery since its foundation in 1856, and not one of these has proved to possess the remotest claim to authenticity. The following are some of the wholly unauthentic portraits that have attracted public attention: Three portraits assigned to Zucchero, who left England in 1580, and cannot have had any relations with Shakespeare—one in the Art Museum, Boston, U.S.A.; another, formerly the property of Richard Cosway, R.A., and afterwards of Mr. J. A. Langford of Birmingham (engraved in mezzotint by H. Green); and a third belonging to the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, who purchased it in 1862. At Hampton Court is a wholly unauthentic portrait of the Chandos type, which was at one time at Penshurst; it bears the legend ‘Ætatis suÆ 34’ (cf. Law’s Cat. of Hampton Court, p. 234). A portrait inscribed ‘Ætatis suÆ 47, 1611,’ belonging to Clement Kingston of Ashbourne, Derbyshire, was engraved in mezzotint by G. F. Storm in 1846. In the picture-gallery at Dulwich is ‘a woman’s head on a boord done by Mr. Burbidge, ye actor’—a well-authenticated example of the actor’s art. It is now the property of Frau Oberst Becker, the discoverer’s daughter-in-law, Darmstadt, Heidelbergerstrasse 111. Some account of Shakespeare’s portraits will be found in the following works: James Boaden, Inquiry into various Pictures and Prints of Shakespeare, 1824; Abraham Wivell, Inquiry into Shakespeare’s Portraits, 1827, with engravings by B. and W. Holl; George Scharf, Principal Portraits of Shakespeare, 1864; J. Hain Friswell, Life-Portraits of Shakespeare, 1864; William Page, Study of Shakespeare’s Portraits, 1876; Ingleby, Man and Book, 1877, pp. 84 seq.; J. Parker Norris, Portraits of Shakespeare, Philadelphia, 1885, with numerous plates; Illustrated Cat. of Portraits in Shakespeare’s Memorial at Stratford, 1896. In 1885 Mr. Walter Rogers Furness issued, at Philadelphia, a volume of composite portraits, combining the Droeshout engraving and the Stratford bust with the Chandos, Jansen, Felton, and Stratford portraits. Cf. Gentleman’s Magazine, 1741, p. 105. A History of the Shakespeare Memorial, Stratford-on-Avon, 1882; Illustrated Catalogue of Pictures in the Shakespeare Memorial, 1896. This was facsimiled in 1862, and again by Mr. Griggs in 1880. Lithographed facsimiles of most of these volumes, with some of the quarto editions of the poems (forty-eight volumes in all), were prepared by Mr. E. W. Ashbee, and issued to subscribers by Halliwell-Phillipps between 1862 and 1871. A cheaper set of quarto facsimiles, undertaken by Mr. W. Griggs, and issued under the supervision of Dr. F. J. Furnivall, appeared in forty-three volumes between 1880 and 1889. Perfect copies range in price, according to their rarity, from £200 to £300. In 1864, at the sale of George Daniel’s library, quarto copies of ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ and of ‘Merry Wives’ (first edition) each fetched £346 10s. On May 14, 1897, a copy of the quarto of ‘The Merchant of Venice’ (printed by James Roberts in 1600) was sold at Sotheby’s for £315. See p. 183. Cf. Bibliographica, i. 489 seq. This copy was described in the Variorum Shakespeare of 1821 (xxi. 449) as in the possession of Messrs. J. and A. Arch, booksellers, of Cornhill. It was subsequently sold at Sotheby’s in 1855 for £163 16s. I cannot trace the present whereabouts of this copy, but it is described in the Variorum Shakespeare of 1821, xxi. 449-50. The copy seems to have been purchased by a member of the Sheldon family in 1628, five years after publication. There is a note in a contemporary hand which says it was bought for £3 15s., a somewhat extravagant price. The entry further says that it cost three score pounds of silver, words that I cannot explain. The Sheldon family arms are on the sides of the volume, and there are many manuscript notes in the margin, interpreting difficult words, correcting misprints, or suggesting new readings. It has been mutilated by a former owner, and the signature of the leaf is missing, but it was presumably G G 3. Correspondents inform me that two copies of the First Folio, one formerly belonging to Leonard Hartley and the other to Bishop Virtue of Portsmouth, showed a somewhat similar irregularity. Both copies were bought by American booksellers, and I have not been able to trace them. Cf. Notes and Queries, 1st ser., vii. 47. Arber, Stationers’ Registers, iii. 242-3. On January 31, 1852, Collier announced in the AthenÆum, that this copy, which had been purchased by him for thirty shillings, and bore on the outer cover the words ‘Tho. Perkins his Booke,’ was annotated throughout by a former owner in the middle of the seventeenth century. Shortly afterwards Collier published all the ‘essential’ manuscript readings in a volume entitled Notes and Emendations to the Plays of Shakespeare. Next year he presented the folio to the Duke of Devonshire. A warm controversy as to the date and genuineness of the corrections followed, but in 1859 all doubt as to their origin was set at rest by Mr. N. E. S. A. Hamilton of the manuscript department of the British Museum, who in letters to the Times of July 2 and 16 pronounced all the manuscript notes to be recent fabrications in a simulated seventeenth-century hand. The best account of eighteenth-century criticism of Shakespeare is to be found in the preface to the Cambridge edition by Mr. Aldis Wright. The memoirs of the various editors in the Dictionary of National Biography supply useful information. I have made liberal use of these sources in the sketch given in the following pages. Mr. Churton Collins’s admirable essay on Theobald’s textua criticism of Shakespeare, entitled ‘The Porson of Shakespearean Critics,’ is reprinted from the Quarterly Review in his Essays and Studies, 1895, pp. 263 et seq.
Collier doubtless followed Theobald’s hint when he pretended to have found in his ‘Perkins Folio’ the extremely happy emendation (now generally adopted) of ‘bisson multitude’ for ‘bosom multiplied’ in Coriolanus’s speech:
How shall this bisson multitude digest
The senate’s courtesy?—(Coriolanus, III. i. 131-2.)
A happy example of his shrewdness may be quoted from King Lear, III. vi. 72, where in all previous editions Edgar’s enumeration of various kinds of dogs included the line ‘Hound or spaniel, brach or hym [or him].’ For the last word Hanmer substituted ‘lym,’ which was the Elizabethan synonym for bloodhound. Edition of 1793, vol. i. p. 7. Cf. the opening line of Matthew Arnold’s Sonnet on Shakespeare:
Others abide our question. Thou art free.
These letters have been interpreted as standing for the inscription ‘In Memoriam Scriptoris’ as well as for the name of the writer. In the latter connection, they have been variously and inconclusively read as Jasper Mayne (Student), a young Oxford writer; as John Marston (Student or Satirist); and as John Milton (Senior or Student). Charles Gildon in 1694, in ‘Some Reflections on Mr. Rymer’s Short View of Tragedy’ which he addressed to Dryden, gives the classical version of this incident. ‘To give the world,’ Gildon informs Dryden, ‘some satisfaction that Shakespear has had as great a Veneration paid his Excellence by men of unquestion’d parts as this I now express of him, I shall give some account of what I have heard from your Mouth, Sir, about the noble Triumph he gain’d over all the Ancients by the Judgment of the ablest Critics of that time. The Matter of Fact (if my Memory fail me not) was this. Mr. Hales of Eaton affirm’d that he wou’d shew all the Poets of Antiquity outdone by Shakespear, in all the Topics, and common places made use of in Poetry. The Enemies of Shakespear wou’d by no means yield him so much Excellence: so that it came to a Resolution of a trial of skill upon that Subject; the place agreed on for the Dispute was Mr. Hales’s Chamber at Eaton; a great many Books were sent down by the Enemies of this Poet, and on the appointed day my Lord Falkland, Sir John Suckling, and all the Persons of Quality that had Wit and Learning, and interested themselves in the Quarrel, met there, and upon a thorough Disquisition of the point, the Judges chose by agreement out of this Learned and Ingenious Assembly unanimously gave the Preference to Shakespear. And the Greek and Roman Poets were adjudg’d to Vail at least their Glory in that of the English Hero.’ Milton, Iconoclastes, 1690, pp. 9-10. Cf. Evelyn’s Diary, November 26, 1661: ‘I saw Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, played, but now the old plays began to disgust the refined age, since His Majesty’s being so long abroad.’ Conquest of Granada, 1672. Essay on Dramatic Poesie, 1668. Some interesting, if more qualified, criticism by Dryden also appears in his preface to an adaptation of ‘Troilus and Cressida’ in 1679. In the prologue to his and D’Avenant’s adaptation of ‘The Tempest’ in 1676, he wrote:
But Shakespeare’s magic could not copied be;
Within that circle none durst walk but he.
Cf. Shakspere’s Century of Praise, 1591-1693, New Shakspere Soc., ed. Ingleby and Toulmin Smith, 1879; and Fresh Allusions, ed. Furnivall, 1886. Cf. W. Sidney Walker, Critical Examination of the Text of Shakespeare, 1859. See Notes and Lectures on Shakespeare and other Poets by S. T. Coleridge, now first collected by T. Ashe, 1883. Coleridge hotly resented the remark, which he attributed to Wordsworth, that a German critic first taught us to think correctly concerning Shakespeare. (Coleridge to Mudford, 1818; cf. Dykes Campbell’s memoir of Coleridge, p. cv.) But there is much to be said for Wordsworth’s general view (see p. 344, note 1). R. E. Hunter, Shakespeare and the Tercentenary Celebration, 1864. Thomas Jordan, a very humble poet, wrote a prologue to notify the new procedure, and referred to the absurdity of the old custom:
For to speak truth, men act, that are between
Forty and fifty, wenches of fifteen
With bone so large and nerve so uncompliant,
When you call Desdemona, enter Giant.
Essays of Elia, ed. Canon Ainger, pp. 180 et seq. Hamlet in 1874-5 and Macbeth in 1888-9 were each performed by Sir Henry Irving for 200 nights in uninterrupted succession; these are the longest continuous runs that any of Shakespeare’s plays are known to have enjoyed. See p. 346. Cf. Alfred Roffe, Shakspere Music, 1878; Songs in Shakspere . . . set to Music, 1884, New Shakspere Soc. Cf. D. G. Morhoff, Unterricht von der teutschen Sprache und Poesie, Kiel, 1682, p. 250. In his ‘Essay Supplementary to the Preface’ in the edition of his Poems of 1815 Wordsworth wrote: ‘The Germans, only of foreign nations, are approaching towards a knowledge of what he [i.e. Shakespeare] is. In some respects they have acquired a superiority over the fellow-countrymen of the poet; for among us, it is a common—I might say an established—opinion that Shakespeare is justly praised when he is pronounced to be “a wild irregular genius in whom great faults are compensated by great beauties.” How long may it be before this misconception passes away and it becomes universally acknowledged that the judgment of Shakespeare . . . is not less admirable than his imagination? . . .’ Cf. Wilhelm Meister. Cf. Jahrbuch der Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft for 1894. Ibid. 1896, p. 438. The exact statistics for 1896 and 1897 were: ‘Othello,’ acted 135 and 121 times for the respective years; ‘Hamlet,’ 102 and 91; ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ 95 and 118; ‘Taming of the Shrew,’ 91 and 92; ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ 84 and 62; ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ 68 and 92; ‘A Winter’s Tale,’ 49 and 65; ‘Much Ado about Nothing,’ 47 and 32; ‘Lear,’ 41 and 34; ‘As You Like It,’ 37 and 29; ‘Comedy of Errors,’ 29 and 43; ‘Julius CÆsar,’ 27 and 29; ‘Macbeth,’ 10 and 12; ‘Timon of Athens,’ 7 and 0; ‘The Tempest,’ 5 and 1; ‘Antony and Cleopatra,’ 2 and 4; ‘Coriolanus,’ 0 and 20; ‘Cymbeline,’ 0 and 4; ‘Richard II,’ 15 and 5; ‘Henry IV,’ Part I, 26 and 23, Part II, 6 and 13; ‘Henry V,’ 4 and 7; ‘Henry VI,’ Part I, 3 and 5, Part II, 2 and 2; ‘Richard III,’ 25 and 26 (Jahrbuch der Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft for 1897, pp. 306 seq., and for 1898, pp. 440 seq.) Jusserand, A French Ambassador, p. 56. Cf. Al. Schmidt, Voltaire’s Verdienst von der EinfÜhrung Shakespeare’s in Frankreich, Konigsberg, 1864. Frederic Melchior, Baron Grimm (1723-1807), for some years a friend of Rousseau and the correspondent of Diderot and the encyclopÉdistes, scattered many appreciative references to Shakespeare in his voluminous Correspondance LittÉraire Philosophique et Critique, extending over the period 1753-1770, the greater part of which was published in 16 vols. 1812-13. MÉlanges Historiques, 182 ?, iii. 141-87. Ibid. 1824, iii. 217-34. Very interesting comments on these performances appeared day by day in the Paris newspaper Le Globe. They were by Charles Magnin, who reprinted them in his Causeries et MÉditations Historiques et LittÉraires (Paris, 1843, ii. 62 et seq.) Cf. Lacroix, Histoire de l’Influence de Shakespeare sur le ThÉÂtre FranÇais, 1867; Edinburgh Review; 1849, pp. 39-77; Elze, Essays, pp. 193 seq.; M. Jusserand, Shakespeare en France sous l’Ancien RÉgime, Paris, 1898. Cf. Giovanni Andres, Dell’ Origine, Progressi e Stato attuale d’ ogni Letteratura, 1782. Cf. New Shaksp. Soc. Trans. 1880-5, pt. ii. 431 seq. Cf. Ungarische Revue (Budapest) Jan. 1881, pp. 81-2; and August Greguss’s Shakspere . . . elsÖ kÖtet: Shakspere pÁlyÁja Budapest, 1880 (an account in Hungarian of Shakespeare’s Life and Works). Cf. Macmillan’s Magazine, May 1880. Compiled between 1669 and 1696; first printed in Letters from the Bodleian Library, 1813, and admirably re-edited for the Clarendon Press during the present year by the Rev. Andrew Clark (2 vols.) See pp. 367-8. The earliest attempts at a concordance were A Complete Verbal Index to the Plays, by F. Twiss (1805), and An Index to the Remarkable Passages and Words by Samuel Ayscough (1827), but these are now superseded. Jordan’s Collections, including this fraudulent will of Shakespeare’s father, was printed privately by J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps in 1864. See p. 267. Reference has already been made to the character of the manuscript corrections made by Collier in a copy of the Second Folio of 1632, known as the Perkins Folio. See p. 312, note 2. The chief authorities on the subject of the Collier forgeries are: An Inquiry into the Genuineness of the Manuscript Corrections in Mr. J. Payne Collier’s Annotated Shakspere Folio, 1632, and of certain Shaksperian Documents likewise published by Mr. Collier, by N. E. S. A. Hamilton, London, 1860; A Complete View of the Shakespeare Controversy concerning the Authenticity and Genuineness of Manuscript Matter affecting the Works and Biography of Shakspere, published by J. Payne Collier as the Fruits of his Researches, by C. M. Ingleby, LL.D. of Trinity College, Cambridge, London, 1865; Catalogue of the Manuscripts and Muniments of Alleyn’s College of God’s Gift at Dulwich, by George F. Warner, M.A., 1881; Notes on the Life of James Payne Collier, with a Complete List of his Works and an Account of such Shakespeare Documents as are believed to be spurious, by Henry B. Wheatley, London, 1884. See Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1595-7, p. 310. See Warners Catalogue of Dulwich MSS. pp. 24-6. Cf. ibid. pp. 26-7. See p. 235, note I. Cf. Warner’s Dulwich MSS. pp.30-31. See p. 254, note I. Most of those that are commonly quoted are phrases in ordinary use by all writers of the day. The only point of any interest raised in the argument from parallelisms of expression centres about a quotation from Aristotle which Bacon and Shakespeare not merely both make, but make in what looks at a first glance to be the same erroneous form. Aristotle wrote in his Nicomachean Ethics, i. 8, that young men were unfitted for the study of political philosophy. Bacon, in the Advancement of Learning (1605), wrote: ‘Is not the opinion of Aristotle worthy to be regarded wherein he saith that young men are not fit auditors of moral philosophy?’ (bk. ii. p. 255, ed. Kitchin). Shakespeare, about 1603, in Troilus and Cressida, II. ii. 166, wrote of ‘young men whom Aristotle thought unfit to hear moral philosophy.’ But the alleged error of substituting moral for political philosophy in Aristotle’s text is more apparent than real. By ‘political’ philosophy Aristotle, as his context amply shows, meant the ethics of civil society, which are hardly distinguishable from what is commonly called ‘morals.’ In the summary paraphrase of Aristotle’s Ethics which was translated into English from the Italian, and published in 1547, the passage to which both Shakespeare and Bacon refer is not rendered literally, but its general drift is given as a warning that moral philosophy is not a fit subject for study by youths who are naturally passionate and headstrong. Such an interpretation of Aristotle’s language is common among sixteenth and seventeenth century writers. Erasmus, in the epistle at the close of his popular Colloquia (Florence, 1530, sig. Q Q), wrote of his endeavour to insinuate serious precepts ‘into the minds of young men whom Aristotle rightly described as unfit auditors of moral philosophy’ (‘in animos adolescentium, quos recte scripsit Aristoteles inidoneos auditores ethicÆ philosophiÆ’). In a French translation of the Ethics by the Comte de Plessis, published at Paris in 1553, the passage is rendered ‘parquoy le ieune enfant n’est suffisant auditeur de la science civile;’ and an English commentator (in a manuscript note written about 1605 in a copy of the book in the British Museum) turned the sentence into English thus: ‘Whether a young man may bee a fitte scholler of morall philosophie.’ In 1622 an Italian essayist, Virgilio Malvezzi, in his preface to his Discorsi sopra Cornelio Tacito, has the remark, ‘E non È discordante da questa mia opinione Aristotele, it qual dice, che i giovani non sono buoni ascultatori delle morali’ (cf. Spedding, Works of Bacon, i. 739, iii. 440). Cf. Birch, Letters of Bacon, 1763, p. 392. A foolish suggestion has been made that Matthew was referring to Francis Bacon’s brother Anthony, who died in 1601; Matthew was writing of a man who was alive more than twenty years later. Cf. Life by Theodore Bacon, London, 1888. See pp. 4, 77, 127. See p. 126. Gervase Markham, Honour in his Perfection, 1624. Loseley MSS. ed. A. J. Kempe, p. 240. His mother, after thirteen years of widowhood, married in 1594 Sir Thomas Heneage, vice chamberlain of Queen Elizabeth’s household; but he died within a year, and in 1596 she took a third husband, Sir William Hervey, who distinguished himself in military service in Ireland and was created a peer as Lord Hervey by James I. By kind permission of the Marquis of Salisbury I lately copied out this essay at Hatfield. In 1588 his brother-in-law, Thomas Arundel, afterwards first Lord Arundel of Wardour (husband of his only sister, Mary), petitioned Lord Burghley to grant him an additional tract of the New Forest about his house at Beaulieu. Although in his ‘nonage,’ Arundel wrote, the Earl was by no means ‘of the smallest hope.’ Arundel, with almost prophetic insight, added that the Earl of Pembroke was Southampton’s ‘most feared rival’ in the competition for the land in question. Arundel was referring to the father of that third Earl of Pembroke who, despite the absence of evidence, has been described as Shakespeare’s friend of the sonnets (cf. Calendar of Hatfield MSS. iii. 365). Cf. Apollinis et Musarum ???t??a ??d????a, Oxford, 1592, reprinted in Elizabethan Oxford (Oxford Historical Society), edited by Charles Plummer, xxix. 294:
| Comes South- Hamp- toniÆ. | Post hunc (i.e. Earl of Essex) insequitur clar de stirpe Dynasta
Iure suo diues quem South-Hamptonia magnum
Vendicat heroem; quo non formosior alter
Affuit, ant doct iuuenis prÆstantior arte;
Ora licet tener vix dum lanugine vernent. |
Historical MSS. Commission, 7th Report (Appendix) p. 521b. Peele’s Anglorum FeriÆ. Cal. of the Duke of Rutland’s MSS. i. 321. Barnabe Barnes, who was one of Southampton’s poetic admirers, addressed a crude sonnet to ‘the Beautiful Lady, The Lady Bridget Manners,’ in 1593, at the same time as he addressed one to Southampton. Both are appended to Barnes’s collection of sonnets and other poems entitled Parthenophe and Parthenophil (cf. Arber’s Garner, v. 486). Barnes apostrophises Lady Bridget as ‘fairest and sweetest’
Of all those sweet and fair flowers,
The pride of chaste Cynthia’s [i.e. Queen Elizabeth’s] rich crown.
See p. 233, note 2. The original letter is at Hatfield. The whole is printed in Historical Manuscripts Commission, 3rd Rep. p. 145. The quotation is a confused reminiscence of Falstaff’s remarks in I Henry IV. II. iv. The last nine words are an exact quotation of lines 190-1. Sidney Papers, ii. 132. See p. 175. See Nash’s Works, ed. Grosart, v. 6. The whole passage runs: ‘How wel or ill I haue done in it I am ignorant: (the eye that sees round about it selfe sees not into it selfe): only your Honours applauding encouragement hath power to make me arrogant. Incomprehensible is the height of your spirit both in heroical resolution and matters of conceit. Vnrepriuebly perisheth that booke whatsoeuer to wast paper, which on the diamond rocke of your judgement disasterly chanceth to be shipwrackt. A dere louer and cherisher you are, as well of the louers of Poets, as of Poets them selues. Amongst their sacred number I dare not ascribe my selfe, though now and then I speak English: that smal braine I haue, to no further vse I conuert saue to be kinde to my frends, and fatall to my enemies. A new brain, a new wit, a new stile, a new soule will I get mee to canonize your name to posteritie, if in this my first attempt I am not taxed of presumption. Of your gracious fauer I despaire not, for I am not altogether Fames out-cast . . . Your Lordship is the large spreading branch of renown, from whence these my idle leaues seeke to deriue their whole nourishing.’ The complimentary title of ‘Amyntas,’ which was naturalised in English literature by Abraham Fraunce’s two renderings of Tasso’s Aminta—one direct from the Italian and the other from the Latin version of Thomas Watson—was apparently bestowed by Spenser on the Earl of Derby in his Colin Clouts come Home againe (1595); and some critics assume that Nash referred in Pierce Pennilesse to that nobleman rather than to Southampton. But Nash’s comparison of his paragon to Ganymede suggests extreme youth, and Southampton was nineteen in 1592 while Derby was thirty-three. ‘Amyntas’ as a complimentary designation was widely used by the poets, and was not applied exclusively to any one patron of letters. It was bestowed on the poet Watson by Richard Barnfield and by other of Watson’s panegyrists. Two manuscript copies of the poem, which has not been printed, are extant—one among the Rawlinson poetical manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, and the other among the manuscripts in the Inner Temple Library (No. 538). Mr. John S. Farmer has kindly sent me transcripts of the opening and concluding dedicatory sonnets. The first, which is inscribed ‘to the right honorable the Lord S[outhampton]’ runs:
Pardon, sweete flower of matchles poetrye,
And fairest bud the red rose euer bare,
Although my muse, devorst from deeper care,
Presents thee with a wanton Elegie.
Ne blame my verse of loose unchastitye
For painting forth the things that hidden are,
Since all men act what I in speeche declare,
Onlie inducÈd with varietie.
Complaints and praises, every one can write,
And passion out their pangs in statlie rimes;
But of loues pleasures none did euer write,
That have succeeded in theis latter times.
Accept of it, deare Lord, in gentle parte,
And better lines, ere long shall honor thee.
The poem follows in about three hundred lines, and the manuscript ends with a second sonnet addressed by Nash to his patron:
Thus hath my penne presum’d to please my friend.
Oh mightst thou lykewise please Apollo’s eye.
No, Honor brookes no such impietie,
Yet Ovid’s wanton muse did not offend.
He is the fountaine whence my streames do flowe—
Forgive me if I speak as I was taught;
Alike to women, utter all I knowe,
As longing to unlade so bad a fraught.
My mynde once purg’d of such lascivious witt,
With purifiÈd words and hallowed verse,
Thy praises in large volumes shall rehearse.
That better maie thy grauer view befitt.
Meanwhile ytt rests, you smile at what I write
Or for attempting banish me your sight.
Tho. Nash.
Daniel’s Certaine Epistles, 1603: see Daniel’s Works, ed. Grosart, i. 216 seq. See Preface to Davies’s Microcosmos, 1603 (Davies’s Works, ed. Grosart, i. 14). At the end of Davies’s Microcosmos there is also a congratulatory sonnet addressed to Southampton on his liberation (ib. p. 96), beginning:
Welcome to shore, unhappy-happy Lord,
From the deep seas of danger and distress.
There like thou wast to be thrown overboard
In every storm of discontentedness.
‘Amours of J. D.’ were doubtless sonnets by Sir John Davies, of which only a few have reached us. There is no ground for J. P. Collier’s suggestion that J. D. was a misprint for M. D., i.e. Michael Drayton, who gave the first edition of his sonnets in 1594 the title of Amours. That word was in France the common designation of collections of sonnets (cf. Drayton’s Poems, ed. Collier, Roxburghe Club, p. xxv). See note to p. 88 supra. The details of his career are drawn from Mr. Arber’s Transcript of the Registers of the Stationers’ Company. Arber, ii. 124. Ib. ii. 713. A younger brother, Richard, was apprenticed to a stationer, Martin Ensor, for seven years from August 24, 1596, but he disappeared before gaining the freedom of the company, either dying young or seeking another occupation (cf. Arber’s Transcript, ii. 213). Cf. Bibliographica, i. 474-98, where I have given an account of Blount’s professional career in a paper called ‘An Elizabethan Bookseller.’ Thorpe gives a sarcastic description of a typical patron, and amply attests the purely commercial relations ordinarily subsisting between dedicator and dedicatee. ‘When I bring you the book,’ he advises Blount, ‘take physic and keep state. Assign me a time by your man to come again. . . . Censure scornfully enough and somewhat like a traveller. Commend nothing lest you discredit your (that which you would seem to have) judgment. . . . One special virtue in our patrons of these days I have promised myself you shall fit excellently, which is to give nothing.’ Finally Thorpe, changing his tone, challenges his patron’s love ‘both in this and, I hope, many more succeeding offices.’ One gave an account of the East India Company’s fleet; the other reported a speech delivered by Richard Martin, M.P., to James I at Stamford Hill during the royal progress to London. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, 1635, p. 527. Two bore his name on the title-page in 1603; one in 1604; two in 1605; two in 1606; two in 1607; three in 1608; one in 1609 (i.e. the Sonnets); three in 1610 (i.e. Histrio-mastix, or the Playwright, as well as Healey’s translations); two in 1611; one in 1612; three in 1613; two in 1614; two in 1616; one in 1618; and finally one in 1624. The last was a new edition of George Chapman’s Conspiracie and Tragedie of Charles Duke of Byron, which Thorpe first published in 1608. They were Wits A.B.C. or a centurie of Epigrams (anon.), by R. West of Magdalen College, Oxford (a copy is in the Bodleian Library); Chapman’s Byron, and Jonson’s Masques of Blackness and Beauty. Chapman and Jonson were very voluminous authors, and their works were sought after by almost all the publishers of London, many of whom were successful in launching one or two with or without the author’s sanction. Thorpe seems to have taken particular care with Jonson’s books, but none of Jonson’s works fell into Thorpe’s hands before 1605 or after 1608, a minute fraction of Jonson’s literary life. It is significant that the author’s dedication—the one certain mark of publication with the author’s sanction—appears in only one of the three plays by Chapman that Thorpe issued, viz. in Byron. One or two copies of Thorpe’s impression of All Fools have a dedication by the author, but it is absent from most of them. No known copy of Thorpe’s edition of Chapman’s Gentleman Usher has any dedication. Many other instances of initials figuring in dedications under slightly different circumstances will occur to bibliographers, but all, on examination, point to the existence of a close intimacy between dedicator and dedicatee. R. S.’s [i.e. possibly Richard Stafford’s] ‘Epistle dedicatorie’ before his Heraclitus (Oxford, 1609) was inscribed ‘to his much honoured father S. F. S.’ An Apologie for Women, or an Opposition to Mr. D. G. his assertion . . . by W. H. of Ex. in Ox. (Oxford, 1609), was dedicated to ‘the honourable and right vertuous ladie, the Ladie M. H.’ This volume, published in the same year as Shakespeare’s Sonnets, offers a pertinent example of the generous freedom with which initials were scattered over the preliminary pages of books of the day. In the volume of 1593 the words run: ‘To the noble and valorous gentleman Master Robert Dudley, enriched with all vertues of the minde and worthy of all honorable desert. Your most affectionate and devoted Michael Drayton.’ In 1610, in dedicating St. Augustine, Of the Citie of God to the Earl of Pembroke, Thorpe awkwardly describes the subject-matter as ‘a desired citie sure in heaven,’ and assigns to ‘St. Augustine and his commentator Vives’ a ‘savour of the secular.’ In the same year, in dedicating Epictetus his Manuall to Florio, he bombastically pronounces the book to be ‘the hand to philosophy; the instrument of instruments; as Nature greatest in the least; as Homer’s Ilias in a nutshell; in lesse compasse more cunning.’ For other examples of Thorpe’s pretentious, half-educated and ungrammatical style, see p. 403, note 2. The suggestion is often made that the only parallel to Thorpe’s salutation of happiness is met with in George Wither’s Abuses Whipt and Stript (London, 1613). There the dedicatory epistle is prefaced by the ironical salutation ‘To himselfe G. W. wisheth all happinesse.’ It is further asserted that Wither had probably Thorpe’s dedication to ‘Mr. W. H.’ in view when he wrote that satirical sentence. It will now be recognised that Wither aimed very gently at no identifiable book, but at a feature common to scores of books. Since his Abuses was printed by George Eld and sold by Francis Burton—the printer and publisher concerned in 1606 in the publication of ‘W. H.’s’ Southwell manuscript—there is a bare chance that Wither had in mind ‘W. H.’s’ greeting of Mathew Saunders, but fifty recently published volumes would have supplied him with similar hints. Thorpe dedicated to Florio Epictetus his Manuall, and Cebes his Table, out of Greek originall by Io. Healey, 1610. He dedicated to the Earl of Pembroke St. Augustine, Of the Citie of God . . . Englished by I. H., 1610, and a second edition of Healey’s Epictetus, 1616. Southwell’s Foure-fould Meditation of 1606 is a book of excessive rarity, only one complete printed copy having been met with in our time. A fragment of the only other printed copy known is now in the British Museum. The work was reprinted in 1895, chiefly from an early copy in manuscript, by Mr. Charles Edmonds, the accomplished bibliographer, who in a letter to the AthenÆum, on November 1, 1873, suggested for the first time the identity of ‘W. H.,’ the dedicator of Southwell’s poem, with Thorpe’s ‘Mr. W. H.’ A manuscript volume at Oscott College contains a contemporary copy of those poems by Southwell which ‘unfained affectionate W.H.’ first gave to the printing press. The owner of the Oscott volume, Peter Mowle or Moulde (as he indifferently spells his name), entered on the first page of the manuscript in his own handwriting an ‘epistel dedicatorie’ which he confined to the conventional greeting of happiness here and hereafter. The words ran: ‘To the right worshipfull Mr. Thomas Knevett Esquire, Peter Mowle wisheth the perpetuytie of true felysitie, the health of bodie and soule with continwance of worshipp in this worlde. And after Death the participation of Heavenlie happiness dewringe all worldes for ever.’ A bookseller (not a printer), William Holmes, who was in business for himself between 1590 and 1615, was the only other member of the Stationers’ Company bearing at the required dates the initials of ‘W. H.’ But he was ordinarily known by his full name, and there is no indication that he had either professional or private relations with Thorpe. Most of his dedications are penned in a loose diction of pretentious bombast which it is difficult to interpret exactly. When dedicating in 1610—the year after the issue of the Sonnets—Healey’s Epictetus his Manuall ‘to a true fauorer of forward spirits, Maister John Florio,’ Thorpe writes of Epictetus’s work: ‘In all languages, ages, by all persons high prized, imbraced, yea inbosomed. It filles not the hand with leaues, but fills ye head with lessons: nor would bee held in hand but had by harte to boote. He is more senceless than a stocke that hath no good sence of this stoick.’ In the same year, when dedicating Healey’s translation of St. Augustine’s Citie of God to the Earl of Pembroke, Thorpe clumsily refers to Pembroke’s patronage of Healey’s earlier efforts in translation thus: ‘He that against detraction beyond expectation, then found your sweete patronage in a matter of small moment without distrust or disturbance, in this work of more weight, as he approoued his more abilitie, so would not but expect your Honours more acceptance.’ This is the sense allotted to the word in the great Variorum edition of 1821 by Malone’s disciple, James Boswell the younger, who, like his master, was a bibliographical expert of the highest authority. The fact that the eighteenth-century commentators—men like Malone and Steevens—who were thoroughly well versed in the literary history of the sixteenth century, should have failed to recognise any connection between ‘Mr. W. H.’ and Shakespeare’s personal history is in itself a very strong argument against the interpretation foisted on the dedication during the present century by writers who have no pretensions to be reckoned the equals of Malone and Steevens as literary archÆologists. James Boaden, a journalist and the biographer of Kemble and Mrs. Siddons, was the first to suggest the Pembroke theory in a letter to the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1832. A few months later Mr. James Heywood Bright wrote to the magazine claiming to have reached the same conclusion as early as 1819, although he had not published it. Boaden re-stated the Pembroke theory in a volume on Shakespeare’s Sonnets which he published in 1837. C. Armitage Brown adopted it in 1838 in his Shakespeare’s Autobiographical Poems. The Rev. Joseph Hunter, who accepted the theory without qualification, significantly pointed out in his New Illustrations of Shakespeare in 1845 (ii. 346) that it had not occurred to any of the writers in the great Variorum editions of Shakespeare, nor to critics so acute in matters of literary history as Malone or George Chalmers. The theory is treated as proved fact in many recent literary manuals. Of its supporters at the date of writing the most ardent is Mr. Thomas Tyler, who published an edition of the sonnets in 1890, and there further advanced a claim to identify the ‘dark lady’ of the sonnets with Mary Fitton, a lady of the Court and the Earl of Pembroke’s mistress. Mr. Tyler has endeavoured to substantiate both the Pembroke and the Fitton theories, by merely repeating his original arguments, in a pamphlet which appeared in April of this year under the title of The Herbert-Fitton Theory: a Reply [i.e. to criticisms of the theories by Lady Newdegate and by myself]. The Pembroke theory, whose adherents have dwindled of late, will henceforth be relegated, I trust, to the category of popular delusions. Cf. Sydney Papers, ed. Collins, i. 353. ‘My Lord (of Pembroke) himself with my Lord Harbert (is) come up to see the Queen’ (Rowland Whyte to Sir Robert Sydney, October 8, 1591), and again p. 361 (November 16, 1595); and p. 372 (December 5, 1595). John Chamberlain wrote to Sir Dudley Carleton on August 1, 1599, ‘Young Lord Harbert, Sir Henrie Carie, and Sir William Woodhouse, are all in election at Court, who shall set the best legge foremost.’ Chamberlain’s Letters (Camden Soc.), p. 57 Thomas Sackville, the author of the Induction to The Mirror for Magistrates and other poetical pieces, and part author of Gorboduc, was born plain ‘Thomas Sackville,’ and was ordinarily addressed in youth as ‘Mr. Sackville.’ He wrote all his literary work while he bore that and no other designation. He subsequently abandoned literature for politics, and was knighted and created Lord Buckhurst. Very late in life, in 1604—at the age of sixty-eight—he became Earl of Dorset. A few of his youthful effusions, which bore his early signature, ‘M. [i.e. Mr.] Sackville,’ were reprinted with that signature unaltered in an encyclopÆdic anthology, England’s Parnassus, which was published, wholly independently of him, in 1600, after he had become Baron Buckhurst. About the same date he was similarly designated Thomas or Mr. Sackville in a reprint, unauthorised by him, of his Induction to The Mirror for Magistrates, which was in the original text ascribed, with perfect correctness, to Thomas or Mr. Sackville. There is clearly no sort of parallel (as has been urged) between such an explicable, and not unwarrantable, metachronism and the misnaming of the Earl of Pembroke ‘Mr. W. H.’ As might be anticipated, persistent research affords no parallel for the latter irregularity. An examination of a copy of the book in the Bodleian—none is in the British Museum—shows that the dedication is signed J. H., and not, as Mr. Fleay infers, by Thorpe. Thorpe had no concern in this volume. On January 27, 1607-8, one Sir Henry Colte was indicted for slander in the Star Chamber for addressing a peer, Lord Morley, as ‘goodman Morley.’ A technical defect—the omission of the precise date of the alleged offence—in the bill of indictment led to a dismissal of the cause. See Les Reportes del Cases in Camera Stellata, 1593 to 1609, edited from the manuscript of Henry Hawarde by W. P. Baildon, F.S.A. (privately printed for Alfred Morrison), p. 348. See pp. 23, 231-2. A tradition has lately sprung up at Wilton to the effect that a letter once existed there in which the Countess of Pembroke bade her son the earl while he was in attendance on James I at Salisbury bring the King to Wilton to witness a performance of As You Like It. The countess is said to have added, ‘We have the man Shakespeare with us.’ No tangible evidence of the existence of the letter is forthcoming, and its tenor stamps it, if it exists, as an ignorant invention. The circumstances under which both King and players visited Wilton in 1603 are completely misrepresented. The Court temporarily occupied Wilton House, and Shakespeare and his comrades were ordered by the officers of the royal household to give a performance there in the same way as they would have been summoned to play before the King had he been at Whitehall. It is hardly necessary to add that the Countess of Pembroke’s mode of referring to literary men is well known: she treated them on terms of equality, and could not in any aberration of mind or temper have referred to Shakespeare as ‘the man Shakespeare.’ Similarly, the present Earl of Pembroke purchased of a London picture-dealer last year what purported to be a portrait of the third Earl of Pembroke, and on the back was pasted a paper, that was represented to date from the seventeenth century, containing some lines from Shakespeare’s Sonnet lxxxi. (9-14), subscribed with the words ‘Shakespeare unto the Earl of Pembroke, 1603’ The ink and handwriting are quite modern, and hardly make pretence to be of old date in the eyes of any one accustomed to study manuscripts. On May 5 of this year some persons interested in the matter, including myself, examined the portrait and the inscription, on the kind invitation of the present Earl, and the inscription was unanimously declared by palmographical experts to be a clumsy forgery unworthy of serious notice. Cf. the engravings of Simon Pass, Stent, and Vandervoerst, after the portrait by Mytens. It is unnecessary, after what has been said above (p. 123), to consider seriously the suggestion that the ‘dark lady’ of the sonnets was Mary Fitton, maid of honour to Queen Elizabeth. This frolicsome lady, who was at one time Pembroke’s mistress and bore him a child, has been introduced into a discussion of the sonnets only on the assumption that her lover, Pembroke, was the youth to whom the sonnets were addressed. Lady Newdegate’s recently published Gossip from a Muniment Room, which furnishes for the first time a connected biography of Pembroke’s mistress, adequately disposes of any lingering hope that Shakespeare may have commemorated her in his black-complexioned heroine. Lady Newdegate states that two well-preserved portraits of Mary Fitton remain at Arbury, and that they reveal a lady of fair complexion with brown hair and grey eyes. Family history places the authenticity of the portraits beyond doubt, and the endeavour lately made by Mr. Tyler, the chief champion of the hopeless Fitton theory, to dispute their authenticity is satisfactorily met by Mr. C. O. Bridgeman in an appendix to the second edition of Lady Newdegate’s book. We also learn from Lady Newdegate’s volume that Miss Fitton, during her girlhood, was pestered by the attentions of a middle-aged admirer, a married friend of the family, Sir William Knollys. It has been lamely suggested by some of the supporters of the Pembroke theory that Sir William Knollys was one of the persons named Will who are alleged to be noticed as competitors with Shakespeare and the supposititious ‘Will Herbert’ for ‘the dark lady’s’ favours in the sonnets (cxxxv., cxxxvi., and perhaps clxiii.) But that is a shot wholly out of range. The wording of those sonnets, when it is thoroughly tested, proves beyond reasonable doubt that the poet was the only lover named Will who is represented as courting the disdainful lady of the sonnets, and that no reference whatever is made there to any other person of that Christian name. Professor Dowden (Sonnets, p. xxxv) writes: ‘It appears from the punning sonnets (cxxxv. and cxliii.) that the Christian name of Shakspere’s friend was the same as his own, Will,’ and thence is deduced the argument that the friend could only be identical with one who, like William Earl of Pembroke, bore that Christian name. Ed. Mayor, p. 35. Manningham’s Diary, p. 92; cf. Barnabe Barnes’s Odes Pastoral sestine 2:
‘But women will have their own wills,
Alas, why then should I complain?’
Besides punning words, printers of poetry in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries made an effort to italicise proper names, unfamiliar words, and words deemed worthy of special emphasis. But they did not strictly adhere to these rules, and, while they often failed to italicise the words that deserved italicisation, they freely italicised others that did not merit it. Capital initial letters were employed with like irregularity. Mr. Wyndham in his careful note on the typography of the quarto of 1609 (pp. 259 seq.) suggests that Elizabethan printers were not erratic in their uses of italics or capital letters, but an examination of a very large number of Elizabethan and Jacobean books has brought me to an exactly opposite conclusion. Barnes’s Parthenophil in Arber’s Garner, v. 440. After quibbling in Sonnet lxxii. on the resemblance between the graces of his cruel mistress’s face and the Graces of classical mythology, Barnes develops the topic in the next sonnet after this manner (the italics are my own):
Why did rich Nature graces grant to thee,
Since thou art such a niggard of thy grace?
O how can graces in thy body be?
Where neither they nor pity find a place! . . .
Grant me some grace! For thou with grace art wealthy
And kindly may’st afford some gracious thing.
Cf. Lear, IV. vi. 279, ‘O undistinguish’d space of woman’s will;’ i.e. ‘O boundless range of woman’s lust.’ Professor Dowden says ‘will to boot’ is a reference to the Christian name of Shakespeare’s friend, ‘William [? Mr. W. H.]’ (Sonnets, p. 236); but in my view the poet, in the second line of the sonnet, only seeks emphasis by repetition in accordance with no uncommon practice of his. The line ‘And will to boot, and will in over-plus,’ is paralleled in its general form and intention in such lines of other sonnets as
Kind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind (cv. 5).
Beyond all date, even to eternity (cxxii. 4).
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night (cxlvii. 14).
In all these instances the second half of the line merely repeats the first half with a slight intensification. Cf. Barnes’s Sonnet lxxiii.:
All her looks gracious, yet no grace do bring
To me, poor wretch! Yet be the Graces there.
Shakespeare refers to the blindness, the ‘sightless view’ of the soul, in Sonnet xxvii., and apostrophises the soul as the ‘centre of his sinful earth’ in Sonnet cxlvi. The use of the word ‘fulfil’ in this and the next line should be compared with Barnes’s introduction of the word in a like context in the passage given above:
Since what she lists her heart fulfils.
Mr. Tyler paraphrases these lines thus: ‘You love your other admirer named Will. Love the name alone, and then you love me, for my name is Will,’ p. 297. Professor Dowden, hardly more illuminating, says the lines mean: ‘Love only my name (something less than loving myself), and then thou lovest me, for my name is Will, and I myself am all will, i.e. all desire.’ The word ‘Will’ is not here italicised in the original edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and there is no ground whatever for detecting in it any sort of pun. The line resembles Barnes’s line quoted above:
Mine heart bound martyr to thy wills.
Because ‘will’ by what is almost certainly a typographical accident is here printed Will in the first edition of the sonnets, Professor Dowden is inclined to accept a reference to the supposititious friend Will, and to believe the poet to pray that the lady may have her Will, i.e. the friend ‘Will [? W. H.]’ This interpretation seems to introduce a needless complication. See p. 83 supra. The word ‘sonnet’ was often irregularly used for ‘song’ or ‘poem.’ A proper sonnet in Clement Robinson’s poetical anthology, A Handefull of Pleasant Delites, 1584, is a lyric in ten four-line alternatively rhymed stanzas. Neither Barnabe Googe’s Eglogs, Epyttaphes, and Sonnettes, 1563, nor George Turbervile’s Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets, 1567, contains a single fourteen-lined poem. The French word ‘quatorzain’ was the term almost as frequently applied as ‘sonnet’ to the fourteen-line stanza in regular sonnet form, which alone falls within my survey. Watson is congratulated on ‘scaling the skies in lofty quatorzains’ in verses before his Passionate Centurie, 1582; cf. ‘crazed quatorzains’ in Thomas Nash’s preface to his edition of Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, 1591; and Amours in Quatorzains on the title-page of the first edition of Drayton’s Sonnets, 1594. See p. 103 supra. All Watson’s sonnets are reprinted by Mr. Arber in Watson’s Poems, 1895. In a preface to Newman’s first edition of Astrophel and Stella the editor, Thomas Nash, in a burst of exultation over what he deemed the surpassing merits of Sidney’s sonnets, exclaimed: ‘Put out your rushlights, you poets and rhymers! and bequeath your crazed quatorzains to the chandlers! for lo, here he cometh that hath broken your legs.’ But the effect of Sidney’s work was just the opposite to that which Nash anticipated. It gave the sonnet in England a vogue that it never enjoyed before or since. With collections of sonnets of the first kind are occasionally interspersed sonnets of the second or third class, but I classify each sonnet-collection according to its predominant characteristic. Daniel reprinted all but nine of the sonnets that had been unwarrantably appended to Sidney’s Astrophel. These nine he permanently dropped. It is reprinted in Arber’s Garner, ii. 225-64. Arber’s Garner, v. 333-486. Ben Jonson developed the same conceit in his masque, The Hue and Cry after Cupid, 1608. Dekker’s well-known song, ‘Oh, sweet content,’ in his play of ‘Patient Grisselde’ (1599), echoes this sonnet of Barnes. Arber’s Garner, viii. 413-52. There is a convenient reprint of Lodge’s Phillis in Elizabethan Sonnet-Cycles by Martha Foote Crow, 1896. See p. 110, note. Arber’s Garner, vi. 135-49. Ib. v. 61-86. Reprinted in Arber’s English Scholars’ Library, 1882. It was licensed for the press on November 19, 1594. Reprinted for the Roxburghe Club in A Lamport Garland, 1881, edited by Mr. Charles Edmonds. Sir John Davies’s Complete Poems, edited by Dr. Grosart, i. 52-62. See p. 128, note. Arber’s Garner, vii. 185-208. Ib. v. 587-622. Cf. Brydges’s Excerpta Tudoriana, 1814, i. 35-7. One was printed with some alterations in Rosseter’s Book of Ayres (1610), and another in the Third Book of Ayres (1617?); see Campion’s Works, ed. A. H. Bullen, pp. 15-16, 102. Arber’s Garner, viii. 171-99. See p. 390 and note. Practically to the same category as these collections of sonnets belong the voluminous laments of lovers, in six, eight, or ten lined stanzas, which, though not in strict sonnet form, closely resemble in temper the sonnet-sequences. Such are Willobie’s Avisa, 1594; Alcilia: Philoparthen’s Loving Folly, by J. C., 1595; Arbor of Amorous Deuices, 1597 (containing two regular sonnets), by Nicholas Breton; Alba, the Months Minde of a Melancholy Lover, by Robert Tofte, 1598; Daiphantus, or the Passions of Love, by Anthony Scoloker, 1604; Breton’s The Passionate Shepheard, or The Shepheardes Loue: set downe in passions to his Shepheardesse Aglaia: with many excellent conceited poems and pleasant sonets fit for young heads to passe away idle houres, 1604 (none of the ‘sonets’ are in sonnet metre); and John Reynolds’s Dolarnys Primerose . . . wherein is expressed the liuely passions of Zeale and Loue, 1606. Though George Wither’s similar productions—his exquisitely fanciful Fidelia (1617) and his Faire-Virtue, the Mistresse of Phil’ Arete (1622)—were published at a later period, they were probably designed in the opening years of the seventeenth century. They were first printed in 1656, seven years after the author’s death, in Poems by that famous wit, William Drummond, London, fol. The volume was edited by Edward Phillips, Milton’s nephew. The best modern edition is that edited by Mr W. C. Ward in the ‘Muses’ Library (1894). Cf. William Browne’s Poems in ‘Muses’ Library (1894), ii. 217 et seq. Chapman imitated Spenser by appending fourteen like sonnets to his translation of Homer in 1610; they were increased in later issues to twenty-two. Very numerous sonnets to patrons were appended by John Davies of Hereford to his Microcosmos (1603) and to his Scourge of Folly (1611). ‘Divers sonnets, epistles, &c.’ addressed to patrons by Joshua Sylvester between 1590 and his death in 1618 were collected in the 1641 edition of his Du Bartas his divine weekes and workes. Remy Belleau in 1566 brought out a similar poetical version of the Book of Ecclesiastes entitled VanitÉ. There are forty-eight sonnets on the Trinity and similar topics appended to Davies’s Wittes Pilgrimage (1610 ?). Graphic illustrations of the attitude of Ronsard and his friends to a Greek poet like Anacreon appear in AnacrÉon et les PoÈmes anacrÉontiques, Texte grec avec les Traductions et Imitations des PoÈtes du XVIe siÈcle, par A. Delboulle (Havre, 1891). A translation of Anacreon by Remy Belleau appeared in 1556. Cf. Sainte-Beuve’s essay, ‘Anacreon au XVIe siÈcle,’ in his Tableau de la PoÉsie franÇaise au XVIe siÈcle (1893), pp. 432-47. In the same connection Recueil des plus beaux Epigrammes grecs, mis en vers franÇois, par Pierre Tamisier (edit. 1617), is of interest. Italy was the original home of the sonnet, and it was as popular a poetic form with Italian writers of the sixteenth century as with those of the three preceding centuries. The Italian poets whose sonnets, after those of Petrarch, were best known in England and France in the later years of the sixteenth century were Serafino dell’ Aquila (1466-1500), Jacopo Sannazzaro (1458-1530), Agnolo Firenzuola (1497-1547), Cardinal Bembo (1470-1547), Gaspara Stampa (1524-1553), Pietro Aretino (1492-1557), Bernardo Tasso (1493-1568), Luigi Tansillo (1510-1568), Gabriello Fiamma (d. 1585), Torquato Tasso (1544-1595), Luigi Groto (fl. 1570), Giovanni Battista Guarini (1537-1612), and Giovanni Battista Marino (1565-1625) (cf. Tiraboschi’s Storia della Letteratura Italiana, 1770-1782; Dr. Garnett’s History of Italian Literature, 1897; and Symonds’s Renaissance in Italy, edit. 1898, vols. iv. and vi.) The notes to Watson’s Passionate Centurie of Love, published in 1582 (see p. 103, note), to Davison’s Poetical Rhapsody, edited by Mr. A. H. Bullen in 1891, and to the Poems of Drummond of Hawthornden, edited by Mr. W. C. Ward in 1894, give many illustrations of English sonnetteers’ indebtedness to Serafino, Groto, Marino, Guarini, Tasso, and other Italian sonnetteers of the sixteenth century.
There are modern reprints of most of these books, but not of all. There is a good reprint of Ronsard’s works, edited by M. P. Blanchemain, in La BibliothÈque ElzÉvirienne, 8 vols. 1867; the Étude sur la Vie de Ronsard, in the eighth volume, is useful. The works of Remy Belleau are issued in the same series. The writings of the seven original members of ‘La PlÉiade’ are reprinted in La PlÉiade FranÇaise, edited by Marty-Laveaux, 16 vols., 1866-93. Maurice SÈve’s DÉlie was reissued at Lyons in 1862. Pierre de Brach’s poems were carefully edited by Reinhold Dezeimeris (2 vols., Paris, 1862). A complete edition of Desportes’s works, edited by Alfred Michiels, appeared in 1863. Prosper Blanchemain edited a reissue of the works of Louise LabÉ in 1875. The works of Jean de la Taille, of Amadis Jamyn, and of Guillaume des Autels are reprinted in TrÉsor des Vieux PoÈtes FranÇais (1877 et annis seq.) See Sainte-Beuve’s Tableau Historique et Critique de la PoÉsie FranÇaise du XVIe SiÈcle (Paris, 1893); Henry Francis Cary’s Early French Poets (London, 1846); Becq de FouquiÈres’ Œuvres choisies des PoÈtes FranÇais du XVIe SiÈcle contemporains avec Ronsard (1880), and the same editor’s selections from De BaÏf, Du Bellay, and Ronsard; Darmesteter et Hatzfeld’s Le SeiziÈme SiÈcle en France—Tableau de la LittÉrature et de la Langue (6th edit., 1897); and Petit de Julleville’s Histoire de la Langue et de la LittÉrature FranÇaise (1897, iii. 136-260).
