147

SONNET S.

[SHAKSPEARE'S Sonnets were entered on the books of the Stationers' Company on the 20th of May, 1609, and published in the same year by Thomas Thorpe, together with the poem called A Lover's Complaint. The allusion to these Sonnets by Meres shows that some of them must have been written, and in private circulation, before 1598; and it is not unlikely that the greater part belong to nearly the same period. A conflict of hypotheses, intimately connected with the date of the Sonnets, has been raised respecting the facts and persons to which they are supposed to refer. The whole interest of this controversy is derived from the assumption that they relate to actual occurrences, and represent real emotions; an assumption justified, to some extent, by the air of gravity and truthfulness that pervades them, but weakened, if not absolutely destroyed, by the want of agreement in the grounds on which it is maintained.

Schlegel is of opinion that the Sonnets reveal the early life of the poet, and contain the confessions of his youth. Coleridge believes that they express an actual passion, and that they were all addressed to a woman; a supposition which Mr. Hallam holds to be totally untenable. Chalmers is at considerable pains to prove that they were addressed to Queen Elizabeth, the allusion to the male sex being intended to typify her majesty in her capacity as sovereign. Gildon and Sewell had a loose impression that the Sonnets were amatory throughout, and written in praise of a mistress. Tyrwhitt, Farmer, Steevens, Malone, and Drake maintain that upwards of a hundred were addressed to a man, but cannot agree as to the exact number, and differ still more widely as to the person who was the object of them. Mr. Armitage Brown, who has treated the subject more elaborately than his predecessors, arrives at the conclusion that they are not sonnets at all, and that they consist of six distinct poems, five of which are addressed to a friend, and the sixth, and last, to

a mistress. Seeing that these irreconcileable views are asserted with equal confidence, and almost with equal success, a temperate judgment would be less disposed to accept any of them than to reject them all. If the Sonnets were so strongly imbued with the auto-biographical element as their interpreters have assumed, the probability is that they would have spoken a more definite language.

Upon one point alone there is an approach to agreement— that of the whole number of one hundred and fifty-four sonnets, one hundred and twenty-six are addressed to a man. This supposition, supported by the general tenor, sentiments, and allusions of the poems, admits of no reasonable doubt. The warmth of the expressions is referred to the fashion of the day; a sufficient explanation of a profound ardour which would otherwise be inexplicable to the modern reader, and of which there are few examples, carried to such a height of devotion, even in the sixteenth century. But the question is, Who was the person to whom Shakspeare offered up this homage? The only clue we possess to guide us upon the inquiry is the publisher's dedication. How little assistance it yields, however, towards clearing up the mystery will be seen by tracing briefly the attempts that have been made to identify the individual there indicated.

6

The dedication is to Mr. W. H.,' who is described as 'the only begetter' of the Sonnets. By their begetter,' observes Mr. Hallam, 'we can only understand the cause of their being written;' and in that sense, and in that sense alone, the word beget is employed by Shakspeare himself, who frequently uses it in his plays. W. H., whoever he may have been, must, therefore, be regarded as the 'dear friend' of the Sonnets.

The first speculation upon the initials was hazarded by Dr. Farmer, who supposed that they applied to William Hart, the son of Shakspeare's sister, Joan; but the discovery of the date of Hart's baptism at Stratford, on the 28th August, 1600, showed that many of the Sonnets, certainly those spoken of in The Wit's Treasury, must have been written

at least two years before he was born. This conclusive evidence, however, was scarcely required to disprove Dr. Farmer's hypothesis. The person addressed in the Sonnets was manifestly a man of birth and influence. William Hart was the son of a hatter, and is presumed to have been the actor who is mentioned in a warrant of the time of Charles I. as an assistant to the King's players. There is no single particular in which he answers to the description of the poet, who, independently of all other circumstances, could never have written in a strain of such ardent admiration and singular respect to his own nephew.

Tyrwhitt believed that he had detected the secret in a punning line in the twentieth Sonnet:

A man in hue all Hews in his controlling.

Putting together this 'Hews,' and the initials in the Dedication, he inferred that the publisher's incognito was one William Hughes. Tyrwhitt was led to this strange conjecture by the capital letter prefixed to the word 'Hews' in the old edition; a custom so common amongst the publications of the period that it is surprising he should have imagined it was intended to convey any special meaning in this instance.

Dr. Drake, arguing from some slight verbal resemblances between the dedications of the Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, and certain passages in the Sonnets, fixed upon Lord Southampton, whose friendship for Shakspeare gave an appearance of probability to the supposition. But several circumstances concur to set aside this claim. In the first place it becomes necessary to invert Lord Southampton's names, Henry Wriothesley, in order to reconcile them to the initials in Thorpe's dedication; and in the second place, there was no period of Lord Southampton's life at which the designation Mr. W. H. could have applied to him, he having succeeded to his father when he was only eight years of age. The incidents also of Lord Southampton's career during the years when it is supposed the Sonnets were written, render it nearly

impossible that he could have been the object of them. In 1597 he was serving in the fleet off the Azores; in 1598 he accompanied Essex to Ireland; from that time he was deeply engaged in the designs of Essex, and in February, 1601, hẻ was tried for high treason, and committed to the Tower, where he was confined till the death of the Queen in 1603. Upon his release in that year, he was appointed Governor of the Isle of Wight, and in the following year he was arrested again. The only interval in which he could have been brought into those relations with Shakspeare which are implied in the poems, was between 1604 and 1609, the date of their publication; but it is agreed on all hands that they belong to a much earlier period, and that some of them, in which the foundations of the imaginary history are laid, were written many years before. Nor can Lord Southampton be traced in the personal qualities, resplendent with youth and beauty, bestowed by Shakspeare upon the subject of his homage.

Mr. Charles Armitage Brown, who avows that he considers the name of the individual less important than the attempt to solve the meaning of the Sonnets, devotes his inquiries chiefly to the latter, touching briefly, but with confidence, on the former. He maintains, as had previously been asserted by others, that the person designated under the initials was William Herbert, afterwards, when the folio was published, William, Earl of Pembroke He thinks that this hypothesis is sustained by 'every probability short of certainty; and Mr. Hallam is of opinion that, though not strictly proved, it is sufficiently so to demand our assent." No proofs, however, are produced in support of it; and the probabilities are of the slenderest kind. The only known link between Shakspeare and the Earl of Pembroke is furnished by the dedication to his lordship and his brother, the Earl of Montgomery, in 1623, of the folio edited by Heminge and Condell, in which a reference is made to the favours Shakspeare, when living, had received from those noblemen. This allusion, and the coincidence between the initials of his

lordship's names and those of the 'begetter' of the Sonnets, and the traditional character of Lord Pembroke as a patron of letters, constitute the whole of the presumptive evidence. Admitting all the force that can be reasonably allowed to such evidence, it amounts to nothing more than a colourable conjecture. But there is a circumstance which distinctly establishes the fact that, whoever W. H. may have been, he could not have been the Earl of Pembroke. Thorpe's dedication, in which the unknown person is described as Mr. W. H., was published in 1609; William Herbert succeeded to his father's title in January, 1600-1, and had, therefore, been Earl of Pembroke nine years before the dedication appeared. It is curious that Mr. Brown should have overlooked in this case a difficulty which he detected in that of the Earl of Southampton; and that, although in his own account of the Earl of Pembroke he gives the date of 1601, he should have pursued his theory under an impression that the succession to the title did not take place till many years afterwards, when the folio was published.

If the laborious ingenuity bestowed upon this part of the inquiry has utterly failed, experimental criticism has not been more fortunate in reference to the Sonnets themselves. It is here that Mr. Brown's analysis presents the most striking original theory that has been ventured upon by any of Shakspeare's commentators; but the results are obtained by a process of reasoning which is calculated to excite surprise rather than to produce conviction. In order to accommodate his theory, it becomes necessary to reconstruct the whole series, and to regard them under an entirely new aspect. Instead of considering them as detached sonnets, connected, more or less, in subject, like the sonnets of Petrarch and Surrey, Mr. Brown distributes them into six separate poems in the sonnet stanza. He thus obtains a suite of incidents, in which Shakspeare is represented, first, advising his friend to marry; next, reproaching him for robbing him of his mistress; and, finally, addressing the lady on her infidelity. An ideal interpretation, somewhat similar to this, has pro