livre i

. No. xxiii., where a list is given of stones and metals comparable with women's features.

{119a} 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.

{119b}

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).

{121} The parody, which is not in sonnet form, is printed in Harvey's _Letter-book_ (Camden Soc. pp. 101-43).

{122} No. vii. of Jodelle's _Contr' Amours_ runs thus:

Combien de fois mes vers ont-ils dore Ces cheueux noirs dignes d'vne Meduse? Combien de fois ce teint noir qui m'amuse, Ay-ie de lis et roses colore? Combien ce front de rides laboure Ay-ie applani? et quel a fait ma Muse Le gros sourcil, ou folle elle s'abuse, Ayant sur luy l'arc d'Amour figure? Quel ay-ie fait son oeil se renfoncant? 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 _OEuvres_, 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).

{123} 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 _protege_ 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.

{127} '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 Caesar as 'my best _lover_' (_Julius Caesar_, 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.'

{128} 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.

{129} 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.'

{131a} See Appendix IV. for a full account of Southampton's relations with Nash and other men of letters.

{131b} See p. 85, note.

{134a} Cf. _Parthenophil_, Madrigal i. line 12; Sonnet xvii. line 9.

{134b} _Parthenophil_, Sonnet xci.

{135} 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.'

{136} See p. 127, note I.

{137} 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.

{138a} _Apologie for Poetrie_ (1595), ed. Shuckburgh, p. 62.

{138b} 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 _protege'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.

{140a} 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.

{140b} 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.)

{141} Donne's _Poems_ (in Muses' Library), ii. 34. See also Donne's sonnets and verse-letters to Mr. Rowland Woodward and Mr. I. W.

{142} See p. 386 note 1.

{143a} Three years was the conventional period which sonnetteers allotted to the development of their passion. Cf. Ronsard, _Sonnets pour Helene_ (No. xiv.), beginning: 'Trois ans sont ja passez que ton oeil me tient pris.'

{143b} Octavius Caesar at thirty-two is described by Mark Antony after the battle of Actium as the 'boy Caesar' 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.

{144} 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.

{145} I describe these pictures from a personal inspection of them which the Duke kindly permitted me to make.

{146a} Cf. Shakespeare's Sonnet iii.:

Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee Calls back the lovely April of her prime.

{146b} 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).

{148a} 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).

{148b} Gervase Markham's _Honour in her Perfection_, 1624.

{149a} Manningham's _Diary_, Camden Soc., p. 148.

{149b} _Court and Times of James I_, I. i. 7.

{149c} See Appendix IV.

{152} 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 (