part i

. vol. ii.

XXIX

_CONSUMMATE SPIRITUAL HARMONY--TWELFTH NIGHT--JIBES AT PURITANISM--THE LANGUISHING CHARACTERS--VIOLA'S INSINUATING GRACE--FAREWELL TO MIRTH_

If the reader would picture to himself Shakespeare's mood during this short space of time at the end of the old century and beginning of the new, let him recall some morning when he has awakened with the sensation of complete physical well-being, not only feeling no definite or indefinite pain or uneasiness, but with a positive consciousness of happy activity in all his organs: when he drew his breath lightly, his head was clear and free, his heart beat peacefully: when the mere act of living was a delight: when the soul dwelt on happy moments in the past and dreamed of joys to come. Recall such a moment, and then conceive it intensified an hundredfold--conceive your memory, imagination, observation, acuteness, and power of expression a hundred times multiplied--and you may divine Shakespeare's prevailing mood in those days, when the brighter and happier sides of his nature were turned to the sun.

There are days when the sun seems to have put on a new and festal splendour, when the air is like a caress to the cheek, and when the glamour of the moonlight seems doubly sweet; days when men appear manlier and wittier, women fairer and more delicate than usual, and when those who are disagreeable and even odious to us appear, not formidable, but ludicrous--so that we feel ourselves exalted above the level of our daily life, emancipated and happy. Such days Shakespeare was now passing through.

It is at this period, too, that he makes sport of his adversaries the Puritans without bitterness, with exquisite humour. Even in _As You Like It_ (iii. 2), we find a little allusion to them, where Rosalind says, "O most gentle Jupiter!--what tedious homily of love have you wearied your parishioners withal, and never cried, 'Have patience, good people!'" In his next play, the typical, solemn, and self-righteous Puritan is held up to ridicule in the Don Quixote-like personage of the moralising and pompous Malvolio, who is launched upon a billowy sea of burlesque situations. Of course the poet goes to work with the greatest circumspection. Sir Toby has made some inquiry about Malvolio, to which Maria answers (ii. 3):--

"_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 And_. I have no exquisite reason for't, but I have reason good enough.

"_Mar_. The devil a Puritan that he is, or anything constantly but a time-pleaser; an affectioned ass, that cons state without book, and utters it by great swarths."

Not otherwise does Molière expressly insist that Tartuffe is not a clergyman, and Holberg that Jacob von Tyboe is not an officer.

A forged letter, purporting to be written by his noble mistress, is made to fall into Malvolio's hands, in which she begs for his love, and instructs him, as a sign of his affection towards her, always to smile, and to wear cross-gartered yellow stockings. He "smiles his face into more lines than are in the new map [of 1598] with the augmentation of the Indies;" he wears his preposterous garters in the most preposterous fashion. The conspirators pretend to think him mad, and treat him accordingly. The Clown comes to visit him disguised in the cassock of Sir Topas the curate. "Well," says the mock priest (not without intention on the poet's part), when Maria gives him the gown, "I'll put it on, and I will dissemble myself in't; and I would I were the first that ever dissembled in such a gown."

It is to Malvolio, too, that the merry and mellow Sir Toby, amid the applause of the Clown, addresses the taunt:--

"_Sir Toby_. Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?

"_Clown_. Yes, by Saint Anne; and ginger shall be hot i' the mouth too."

In these words, which were one day to serve as a motto to Byron's _Don Juan_, there lies a gay and daring declaration of rights.

_Twelfth Night, or What you Will_, must have been written in 1601, for in the above-mentioned diary kept by John Manningham, of the Middle Temple, we find this entry, under the date February 2, 1602: "At our feast wee had a play called Twelve Night, or what you will, much like the commedy of errores, or Menechmi in Plautus, but most like and neere to that in Italian called _Inganni_. A good practise in it to make the steward beleeve his lady widdowe was in love with him," &c. That the play cannot have been written much earlier is proved by the fact that the song, "Farewell, dear heart, since I must needs be gone," which is sung by Sir Toby and the Clown (ii. 3), first appeared in a song-book (_The Booke of Ayres_) published by Robert Jones, London, 1601. Shakespeare has altered its wording very slightly. In all probability _Twelfth Night_ was one of the four plays which were performed before the court at Whitehall by the Lord Chamberlain's company at Christmastide, 1601-2, and no doubt it was acted for the first time on the evening from which it takes its name.

Among several Italian plays which bore the name of _Gl'Inganni_ there is one by Curzio Gonzaga, published in Venice in 1592, in which a sister dresses herself as her brother and takes the name of Cesare--in Shakespeare, Cesario--and another, published in Venice in 1537, the

## action of which bears a general resemblance to that of _Twelfth Night_.

In this play, too, passing mention is made of one "Malevolti," who may have suggested to Shakespeare the name Malvolio.

The matter of the play is found in a novel of Bandello's, translated in Belleforest's _Histoires Tragiques_; and also in Barnabe Rich's translation of Cinthio's _Hecatomithi_, published in 1581, which Shakespeare appears to have used. The whole comic part of the action, and the characters of Malvolio, Sir Toby, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and the Clown, are of Shakespeare's own invention.

There occurs in Ben Jonson's _Every Man out of his Humour_ a speech which seems very like an allusion to _Twelfth Night;_ but as Jonson's play is of earlier date, the speech, if the allusion be not fanciful, must have been inserted later.[1]

As was to be expected, _Twelfth Night_ became exceedingly popular. The learned Leonard Digges, the translator of Claudian, enumerating in his verses, "Upon Master William Shakespeare" (1640), the poet's most popular characters, mentions only three from the comedies, and these from _Much Ado_ and _Twelfth Night_. He says:--

"Let but _Beatrice_ And _Benedicke_ be seene, loe in a trice The Cockpit, Galleries, Boxes, all are full To hear _Malvoglio_, that crosse garter'd Gull."

_Twelfth Night_ is perhaps the most graceful and harmonious comedy Shakespeare ever wrote. It is certainly that in which all the notes the poet strikes, the note of seriousness and of raillery, of passion, of tenderness, and of laughter, blend in the richest and fullest concord. It is like a symphony in which no strain can be dispensed with, or like a picture veiled in a golden haze, into which all the colours resolve themselves. The play does not overflow with wit and gaiety like its predecessor; we feel that Shakespeare's joy of life has culminated and is about to pass over into melancholy; but there is far more unity in it than in _As You Like It_, and it is a great deal more dramatic.

A. W. Schlegel long ago made the penetrating observation that, in the opening speech of the comedy, Shakespeare reminds us how the same word, "fancy," was applied in his day both to love and to fancy in the modern sense of the term; whence the critic argued, not without ingenuity, that love, regarded as an affair of the imagination rather than of the heart, is the fundamental theme running through all the variations of the play. Others have since sought to prove that capricious fantasy is the fundamental trait in the physiognomy of all the characters. Tieck has compared the play to a great iridescent butterfly, fluttering through pure blue air, and soaring in its golden glory from the many-coloured flowers into the sunshine.

Twelfth Night, in Shakespeare's time, brought the Christmas festivities of the upper classes to an end; among the common people they usually lasted until Candlemas. On Twelfth Night all sorts of sports took place. The one who chanced to find a bean baked into a cake was hailed as the Bean King, chose himself a Bean Queen, introduced a reign of unbridled frivolity, and issued whimsical commands, which had to be punctually obeyed. Ulrici has sought to discover in this an indication that the play represents a sort of lottery, in which Sebastian, the Duke, and Maria chance to win the great prize. The bibulous Sir Toby, however, can scarcely be regarded as a particularly desirable prize for Maria; and the second title of the play, _What you Will_, indicates that Shakespeare did not lay any stress upon the _Twelfth Night_.

This comedy is connected by certain filaments with its predecessor, _As You Like It_. The passion which Viola, in her male attire, awakens in Olivia, reminds us of that with which Rosalind inspires Phebe. But the motive is quite differently handled. While Rosalind gaily and unfeelingly repudiates Phebe's burning love, Viola is full of tender compassion for the lady whom her disguise has led astray. In the admirably worked-up confusion between Viola and her twin brother Sebastian, an effect from the _Comedy of Errors_ is repeated; but the different circumstances and method of treatment make this motive also practically new.

With a careful and even affectionate hand, Shakespeare has elaborated each one of the many characters in the play.

The amiable and gentle Duke languishes, sentimental and fancy-sick, in hopeless enamourment. He is devoted to the fair Countess Olivia, who will have nothing to say to him, and whom he none the less besieges with his suit. An ardent lover of music, he turns to it for consolation; and among the songs sung to him by the Clown and others, there occurs the delicate little poem, of wonderful rhythmic beauty, "Come away, come away, death." It exactly expresses the soft and melting mood in which his days pass, lapped in a nerveless melancholy. To the melody abiding in it we may apply the lovely words spoken by Viola of the melody which preludes it:--

"It gives a very echo to the seat Where love is throned."

In his fruitless passion, the Duke has become nervous and excitable, inclined to violent self-contradictions. In one and the same scene (ii. 4) he first says that man's love is

"More giddy and unfirm, More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn"

than woman's; and then, a little further on, he says of his own love--

"There is no woman's sides Can bide the beating of so strong a passion As love doth give my heart; no woman's heart So big to hold so much: they lack retention."

The Countess Olivia forms a pendant to the Duke; she, like him, is full of yearning melancholy. With an ostentatious exaggeration of sisterly love, she has vowed to pass seven whole years veiled like a nun, consecrating her whole life to sorrow for her dead brother. Yet we find in her speeches no trace of this devouring sorrow; she jests with her household, and rules it ably and well, until, at the first sight of the disguised Viola, she flames out into passion, and, careless of the traditional reserve of her sex, takes the most daring steps to win the supposed youth. She is conceived as an unbalanced character, who passes at a bound from exaggerated hatred for all worldly things to total forgetfulness of her never-to-be-forgotten sorrow. Yet she is not comic like Phebe; for Shakespeare has indicated that it is the Sebastian type, foreshadowed in the disguised Viola, which is irresistible to her; and Sebastian, we see, at once requites the love which his sister had to reject. Her utterance of her passion, moreover, is always poetically beautiful.

Yet while she is sighing in vain for Viola, she necessarily appears as though seized with a mild erotic madness, similar to that of the Duke: and the folly of each is parodied in a witty and delightful fashion by Malvolio's entirely ludicrous love for his mistress, and vain confidence that she returns it. Olivia feels and says this herself, where she exclaims (iii. 4)--

"Go call him hither.--I am as mad as he If sad and merry madness equal be."

Malvolio's figure is drawn in very few strokes, but with incomparable certainty of touch. He is unforgetable in his turkey-like pomposity, and the heartless practical joke which is played off upon him is developed with the richest comic effect. The inimitable love-letter, which Maria indites to him in a handwriting like that of the Countess, brings to light all the lurking vanity in his nature, and makes his self-esteem, which was patent enough before, assume the most extravagant forms. The scene in which he approaches Olivia, and triumphantly quotes the expressions in the letter, "yellow stockings," and "cross-gartered," while every word confirms her in the belief that he is mad, is one of the most effective on the comic stage. Still more irresistible is the scene (iv. 2) in which Malvolio is imprisoned as a madman in a dark room, while the Clown outside now assumes the voice of the Curate, and seeks to exorcise the devil in him, and again, in his own voice, converses with the supposed Curate, sings songs, and promises Malvolio to carry messages for him. We have here a comic _jeu de théâtre_ of the first order.

In harmony with the general tone of the play, the Clown is less witty and more musical than Touchstone in _As You Like It._ He is keenly alive to the dignity of his calling: "Foolery, sir, does walk about the orb like the sun: it shines everywhere." He has many delightful sayings, as for example, "Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage," or the following demonstration (v. I) that one is the better for one's foes, and the worse for one's friends:--

"Marry, sir, my friends praise me, and make an ass of me; now, my foes tell me plainly I am an ass: so that by my foes, sir, I profit in the knowledge of myself, and by my friends I am abused: so that, conclusions to be as kisses, if your four negatives make your two affirmatives, why then, the worse for my friends, and the better for my foes."

Shakespeare even departs from his usual practice, and, as though to guard against any misunderstanding on the part of his public, makes Viola expound quite dogmatically that it "craves a kind of wit" to play the fool (iii. I):--

"He must observe their mood on whom he jests, The quality of persons, and the time, And, like the haggard, check at every feather That comes before his eye. This is a practice As full of labour as a wise man's art."

The Clown forms a sort of connecting-link between the serious characters and the exclusively comic figures of the play--the pair of knights, Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, who are entirely of Shakespeare's own invention. They are sharply contrasted. Sir Toby, sanguine, red-nosed, burly, a practical joker, always ready for "a hair of the dog that bit him," a figure after the style of Bellman;[2] Sir Andrew, pale as though with the ague, with thin, smooth, straw-coloured hair, a wretched little nincompoop, who values himself on his dancing and fencing, quarrelsome and chicken-hearted, boastful and timid in the same breath, and grotesque in his every movement. He is a mere echo and shadow of the heroes of his admiration, born to be the sport of his associates, their puppet, and their butt; and while he is so brainless as to think it possible he may win the love of the beautiful Olivia, he has at the same time an inward suspicion of his own stupidity which now and then comes in refreshingly: "Methinks sometimes I have no more wit than a Christian or an ordinary man has; but I am a great eater of beef, and, I believe, that does harm to my wit" (i. 3). He does not understand the simplest phrase he hears, and is such a mere reflex and parrot that "I too" is, as it were, the watchword of his existence. Shakespeare has immortalised him once for all in his reply when Sir Toby boasts that Maria adores him (ii. 3), "I was adored once too." Sir Toby sums him up in the phrase:

"For Andrew, if he were opened, and you find so much blood in his liver as will clog the foot of a flea, I'll eat the rest of the anatomy."

The central character in _Twelfth Night_ is Viola, of whom her brother does not say a word too much when, thinking that she has been drowned, he exclaims, "She bore a mind that envy could not but call fair."

Shipwrecked on the coast of Illyria, her first wish is to enter the service of the young Countess; but learning that Olivia is inaccessible, she determines to dress as a page (a eunuch) and approach the young unmarried Duke, of whom she has heard her father speak with warmth. He at once makes the deepest impression upon her heart, but being ignorant of her sex, does not dream of what is passing within her; so that she is perpetually placed in the painful position of being employed as a messenger from the man she loves to another woman. She gives utterance to her love in carefully disguised and touching words (ii. 4):--

"My father had a daughter lov'd a man, As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman, I should your lordship. _Duke_. And what's her history? _Vio_. A blank, my lord. She never told her love,-- But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud, Feed on her damask cheek: she pin'd in thought: And, with a green and yellow melancholy, She sat like Patience on a monument, Smiling at grief."

But the passion which possesses her makes her a more eloquent messenger of love than she designs to be. To Olivia's question as to what she would do if she loved her as her master does, she answers (i. 5):--

"Make me a willow cabin at your gate, And call upon my soul within the house; Write loyal cantons of contemned love, And sing them loud even in the dead of night; Holla your name to the reverberate hills, And make the babbling gossip of the air Cry out, Olivia! O! you should not rest Between the elements of air and earth, But you should pity me."

In short, if she were a man, she would display all the energy which the Duke lacks. No wonder that, against her own will, she awakens Olivia's love. She herself, as a woman, is condemned to passivity; her love is wordless, deep, and patient. In spite of her sound understanding, she is a creature of emotion. It is a very characteristic touch when, in the scene (iii. 5) where Antonio, taking her for Sebastian, recalls the services he has rendered, and begs for assistance in his need, she exclaims that there is nothing, not even "lying vainness, babbling drunkenness, or any taint of vice," that she hates so much as ingratitude. However bright her intelligence, her soul from first to last outshines it. Her incognito, which does not bring her joy as it does to Rosalind, but only trouble and sorrow, conceals the most delicate womanliness. She never, like Rosalind or Beatrice, utters an audacious or wanton word. Her heart-winning charm more than makes up for the high spirits and sparkling humour of the earlier heroines. She is healthful and beautiful, like these her somewhat elder sisters; and she has also their humorous eloquence, as she proves in her first scene with Olivia. Yet there rests upon her lovely figure a tinge of melancholy. She is an impersonation of that "farewell to mirth" which an able English critic discerns in this last comedy of Shakespeare's brightest years.[3]

[1] There is some (ironic) discussion of a possible criticism that might be brought against a playwright: "That the argument of his comedy might have been of some other nature, as of a duke to be in love with a countess, and that countess to be in love with the duke's son, and the son to love the lady's waiting-maid; some such cross wooing, with a clown to their serving-man...."

[2] See the footnote 7 in chapter XXII:

"A dance of all the gods upon Olympus, With fauns and graces and the muses twined."

From a poem by Tegnér on Bellman, the Swedish convivial lyrist.

[3] "It is in some sort a farewell to mirth, and the mirth is of the finest quality, an incomparable ending. Shakespeare has done greater things, but he has never done anything more delightful."--_Arthur Symons._

XXX

_THE REVOLUTION IN SHAKESPEARE'S SOUL--THE GROWING MELANCHOLY OF THE FOLLOWING PERIOD--PESSIMISM, MISANTHROPY_

For the time is now approaching when mirth, and even the joy of life, are extinguished in his soul. Heavy clouds have massed themselves on his mental horizon--their nature we can only divine--and gnawing sorrows and disappointments have beset him. We see his melancholy growing and extending; we observe its changing expressions, without knowing its causes. This only we know, that the stage which he contemplates with his mind's eye, like the material stage on which he works, is now hung with black. A veil of melancholy descends over both.

He no longer writes comedies, but sends a train of gloomy tragedies across the boards which so lately echoed to the laughter of Beatrice and Rosalind.

From this point, for a certain period, all his impressions of life and humanity become ever more and more painful. We can see in his Sonnets how even in earlier and happier years a restless passionateness had been constantly at war with the serenity of his soul, and we can note how, at this time also, he was subject to accesses of stormy and vehement unrest. As time goes on, we can discern in the series of his dramas how not only what he saw in public and political life, but also his private experience, began to inspire him, partly with a burning compassion for humanity, partly with a horror of mankind as a breed of noxious wild animals, partly, too, with loathing for the stupidity, falsity, and baseness of his fellow-creatures. These feelings gradually crystallise into a large and lofty contempt for humanity, until, after a space of eight years, another revolution occurs in his prevailing mood. The extinguished sun glows forth afresh, the black heaven has become blue again, and the kindly interest in everything human has returned. He attains peace at last in a sublime and melancholy clearness of vision. Bright moods, sunny dreams from the days of his youth, return upon him, bringing with them, if not laughter, at least smiles. High-spirited gaiety has for ever vanished; but his imagination, feeling itself less constrained than of old by the laws of reality, moves lightly and at ease, though a deep earnestness now underlies it, and much experience of life.

But this inward emancipation from the burthen of earthly life does not occur, as we have said, until about eight years after the point which we have now reached.

For a little time longer the strong and genial joy of life is still dominant in his mind. Then it begins to darken, and, after a short tropical twilight, there is night in his soul and in all his works.

In the tragedy of _Julius Cæsar_ there still reigns only a manly seriousness. The theme seems to have attracted him on account of the analogy between the conspiracy against Cæsar and the conspiracy against Elizabeth. Despite the foolish precipitancy of their action, the leaders of this conspiracy, men like Essex and his comrade Southampton, had Shakespeare's full personal sympathy; and he transferred some of that sympathy to Brutus and Cassius. He created Brutus under the deeply-imprinted conviction that unpractical magnanimity, like that of his noble friends, is unfitted to play an effective part in the drama of history, and that errors of policy revenge themselves at least as sternly as moral delinquencies.

In _Hamlet_ Shakespeare's growing melancholy and bitterness take the upper hand. For the hero, as for the poet, youth's bright outlook upon life has been overclouded. Hamlet's belief and trust in mankind have gone to wreck. Under the disguise of apparent madness, the melancholy life-lore which Shakespeare, at his fortieth year, had stored up within him, here finds expression in words of spiritual profundity such as had not yet been thought or uttered in Northern Europe.

We catch a glimpse at this point of one of the subsidiary causes of Shakespeare's melancholy. As actor and playwright he stands in a more and more strained relation to the continually growing Free Church movement of the age, to Puritanism, which he comes to regard as nothing but narrow-mindedness and hypocrisy. It was the deadly enemy of his calling; it secured, even in his lifetime, the prohibition of theatrical performances in the provinces, a prohibition which after his death was extended to the capital. From _Twelfth Night_ onwards, an unremitting war against Puritanism, conceived as hypocrisy, is carried on through _Hamlet,_ through the revised version of _All's Well that Ends Well_, and through _Measure for Measure_, in which his wrath rises to a tempestuous pitch, and creates a figure to which Molière's Tartuffe can alone supply a parallel.

What struck him so forcibly in these years was the pitifulness of earthly life, exposed as it is to disasters, not allotted by destiny, but brought about by a conjunction of stupidity with malevolence.

It is especially the power of malevolence that now looms large before his eyes. We see this in Hamlet's astonishment that it is possible for a man "to smile and smile and be a villain." Still more strongly is it apparent in _Measure for Measure_ (v. I):--

"Make not impossible That which but seems unlike. 'Tis not impossible, But one, the wicked'st caitiff on the ground, May seem as shy, as grave, as just, as absolute, As Angelo; even so may Angelo, In all his dressings, characts, titles, forms, Be an arch-villain."

It is this line of thought that leads to the conception of Iago, Goneril, and Regan, and to the wild outbursts of Timon of Athens.

_Macbeth_ is Shakespeare's first attempt, after _Hamlet_, to explain the tragedy of life as a product of brutality and wickedness in conjunction--that is, of brutality multiplied and raised to the highest power by wickedness. Lady Macbeth poisons her husband's mind. Wickedness instils drops of venom into brutality, which, in its inward essence, may be either weakness, or brave savagery, or stupidity of manifold kinds. Whereupon brutality falls a-raving, and becomes terrible to itself and others.

The same formula expresses the relation between Othello and Iago.

_Othello_ was a monograph. _Lear_ is a world-picture. Shakespeare turns from _Othello_ to _Lear_ in virtue of the artist's need to supplement himself, to follow up every creation with its counterpart or foil.

_Lear_ is the greatest problem Shakespeare had yet proposed to himself, all the agonies and horrors of the world compressed into five short acts. The impression of _Lear_ may be summed up in the words: a world-catastrophe. Shakespeare is no longer minded to depict anything else. What is echoing in his ears, what is filling his mind, is the crash of a ruining world.

This becomes even clearer in his next play, _Antony and Cleopatra._ This subject enabled him to set new words to the music within him. In the history of Mark Antony he saw the deep downfall of the old world-republic--the might of Rome, austere and rigorous, collapsing at the touch of Eastern luxury.

By the time Shakespeare had written _Antony and Cleopatra,_ his melancholy had deepened into pessimism. Contempt becomes his abiding mood, an all-embracing scorn for mankind, which impregnates every drop of blood in his veins, but a potent and creative scorn, which hurls forth thunderbolt after thunderbolt. _Troilus and Cressida_ strikes at the relation of the sexes, _Coriolanus_ at political life; until all that, in these years, Shakespeare has endured and experienced, thought and suffered, is concentrated into the one great despairing figure of Timon of Athens, "misanthropos," whose savage rhetoric is like a dark secretion of clotted blood and gall, drawn off to assuage pain.

BOOK SECOND

I

_INTRODUCTION--THE ENGLAND OF ELIZABETH IN SHAKESPEARE'S YOUTH_

Everything had flourished in the England of Elizabeth while Shakespeare was young. The sense of belonging to a people which, with great memories and achievements behind it, was now making a decisive and irresistible new departure--the consciousness of living in an age when the glorious culture of antiquity was being resuscitated, and when great personalities were vindicating for England a lofty and assured position, alike in the practical and in the intellectual departments of life--these feelings mingled in his breast with the vernal glow of youth itself. He saw the star of his fatherland ascending, with his own star in its train.

It seemed to him as though men and women had in that day richer abilities, a more daring spirit, and fuller powers of enjoyment than they had possessed in former times. They had more fire in their blood, more insatiable longings, a keener appetite for adventure, than the men and women of the past. They knew how to rule with courage and wisdom, like the Queen and Lord Burghley; how to live nobly and fight gloriously, to love with passion and sing with enthusiasm, like the beautiful hero of the younger generation, Sir Philip Sidney, who found an early Achilles-death. They were bent on enjoying existence with all their senses, comprehending it with all their powers, revelling in wealth and splendour, in beauty and wit; or they set forth to voyage round the world, to see its marvels, conquer its treasures, give their names to new countries, and display the flag of England on unknown seas.

Statesmanship and generalship were represented among them by the men who, in these years, had humbled Spain, rescued Holland, held Scotland in awe. They were sound and vigorous natures. Although they all had the literary proclivities of the Renaissance, they were before everything practical men, keen observers of the signs of the times, firm and wary in adversity, in prosperity prudent and temperate.

Shakespeare had seen Spenser's faithful friend, Sir Walter Raleigh, next to himself and Francis Bacon the most brilliant and interesting Englishman of his day, after covering himself with renown as a soldier, a viking, and a discoverer, win the favour of Elizabeth as a courtier, and the admiration of the people as a hero and poet. Shakespeare no doubt laid to heart these lines in his elegy on Sidney:--

"England doth hold thy limbs, that bred the same; Flanders thy valour, where it last was tried; The camp thy sorrow, where thy body died: Thy friends thy want; the world thy virtues' fame."

For Raleigh, too, was a poet, as well as an orator and historian. "We picture him to ourselves," says Macaulay, "sometimes reviewing the Queen's guard, sometimes giving chase to a Spanish galleon, then answering the chiefs of the country party in the House of Commons, then again murmuring one of his sweet lovesongs too near the ears of her Highness's maids of honour, and soon after poring over the Talmud, or collating Polybius with Livy."[1]

And Shakespeare had seen the young Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, who in 1577, when only ten years old, had made a sensation at court by wearing his hat in the Queen's presence and denying her request for a kiss; at the age of eighteen win renown for himself as a cavalry general under Leicester in the Netherlands, and at the age of twenty depose Raleigh from the highest place in Elizabeth's favour. He played "cards or one game or another with her ... till birds' sing in the morning." She shut herself up with him in the daytime, while the Venetian and French ambassadors, who had already learnt to wait at locked doors in the time of his step-father, Leicester, jested with each other in the anteroom as to whether mounting guard in this fashion ought to be called _tener la mula_ or _tenir la chandelle_. And Essex demanded that Raleigh should be sacrificed to his youthful devotion. As captain of the guard, Raleigh had to stand at the door with a drawn sword, in his brown and orange uniform, while the handsome youth whispered to the spinster Queen of fifty-four things which set her heart beating. He made all the mischief he could between her and Raleigh. She assured him that he had no reason to "disdain" a man like that. But Essex asked her--so he himself writes--"Whether he could have comfort to give himself over to the service of a mistress that was in awe of such a man;" "and," he continues, "I think he, standing at the door, might very well hear the worst I spoke of him."

This impetuosity characterised Essex throughout his career; but he soon developed great qualities, of which his first appearances gave no promise; and when Shakespeare made his acquaintance, probably in the year 1590, his personality must have been extremely winning. Himself a poet, he no doubt knew how to value _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, and its author. In all probability, Shakespeare even at this time found a protector in the young nobleman, and afterwards made acquaintance through him with his kinsman Southampton, six years younger than himself. Essex had already distinguished himself as a soldier. In May 1589 he had been the first Englishman to wade ashore upon the coast of Portugal, and in the lines before Lisbon he had challenged any of the Spanish garrison to single combat in honour of his queen and mistress. In July 1591 he joined the standard of Henry of Navarre with an auxiliary force of 4000 men; he shared all the hardships of the common soldiers; during the siege of Rouen he challenged the leader of the enemy's forces to single combat; and then by his incapacity he dissipated all the results of the campaign. His army melted away to almost nothing.

He was at home during the following years, when Shakespeare probably came to know him well, and to appreciate his chivalrous nature, his courage and talent, his love of poetry and science, and his helpfulness towards men of ability, such as Francis Bacon and others. He therefore, no doubt, followed with more than the ordinary patriotic interest the expedition of the English fleet to Cadiz in 1596, in which the two old antagonists, Raleigh and Essex, were to fight side by side. Raleigh here won a brilliant victory over the great galleons of the Spanish fleet, burning them all except two, which he captured; while on the following day, when a severe wound in the leg prevented Raleigh from taking part in the action, Essex, at the head of his troops, stormed and sacked the town of Cadiz. In his despatches to Elizabeth, Raleigh praised Essex for this exploit. He became the hero of the day; his name was in every mouth, and he was even eulogised from the pulpit of St. Paul's.

It was indeed a great age. England's world-wide power was founded at the expense of defeated and humiliated Spain; England's world-wide commerce and industry came into existence. Before Elizabeth came to the throne, Antwerp had been the metropolis of commerce; during her reign, London took that position. The London Exchange was opened in 1571; and twenty years later, English merchants all the world over had appropriated to themselves the commerce which had formerly been almost entirely in the hands of the Hanseatic Towns. London urchins hung about the wharves of the Thames, listening to the marvels related by seamen who had made the voyage round the Cape of Good Hope to Hindostan. Sunburnt, scarred, and bearded men haunted the taverns; they had crossed the ocean, lived in the Bermuda Islands, and brought negroes and Red Indians and great monkeys home with them. They told tales of the golden Eldorado, and of real and imaginary perils in distant quarters of the globe.

This peaceful development of commerce and industry had taken place simultaneously with the development of naval and military power. And the scientific and poetical culture of England advanced with equal strides. While mariners had brought home tidings of many an unknown shore, scholars also had made voyages of discovery in Greek and Roman letters; and while they praised and translated authors unheard of before, dilettanti brought forward and interpreted Italian and Spanish poets who served as models of invention and delicacy. The world, which had hitherto been a little place, had suddenly grown vast; the horizon, which had been narrow, widened out all of a sudden, and every mind was filled with hopes for the days to come.

It had been a vernal season, and it was a vernal mood that had uttered itself in the songs of the many poets. In our days, when the English language is read by hundreds of millions, the poets of England may be quickly counted. In those days the country possessed something like three hundred lyric and dramatic poets, who, with potent productivity, wrote for a reading public no larger than that of Denmark to-day; for of the six millions of the population, four millions could not read. But the talent for writing verses was as widespread among the Englishmen of that time as the talent for playing the piano among German ladies of to-day. The power of action and the gift of song did not exclude each other.

But the blossoming springtide had been short, as springtide always is.

[1] Macaulay, _Essays_--"Burleigh and his Times."

II

_ELIZABETH'S OLD AGE_

At the dawn of the new century the national mood had already altered.

Elizabeth herself was no longer the same. There had always been a dark side to her nature, but it had passed almost unnoticed in the splendour which national prosperity, distinguished men, great achievements and fortunate events had shed around her person. Now things were changed.

She had always been excessively vain; but her coquettish pretences to youth and beauty reached their height after her sixtieth year. We have seen how, when she was sixty, Raleigh, from his prison, addressed a letter to Sir Robert Cecil, intended for her eyes, in which he sought to regain her favour by comparing her to Venus and Diana. When she was sixty-seven, Essex's sister, in a supplication for her brother's life, wrote of that brother's devotion to "her beauties," which did not merit so hard a punishment, and of her "excellent beauties and perfections," which "ought to feel more compassion." In the same year the Queen took part, masked, in a dance at Lord Herbert's marriage; and she always looked for expressions of flattering astonishment at the youthfulness of her appearance.

When she was sixty-eight, Lord Mountjoy wrote to her of her "faire eyes," and begged permission to "fill his eyes with their onely deere and desired object." This was the style which every one had to adopt who should have the least prospect of gaining, preserving, or regaining her favour.

In 1601 Lord Pembroke, then twenty-one years old, writes to Cecil (or, in other words, to Elizabeth, in her sixty-eighth year) imploring permission once more to approach the Queen, "whose incomparable beauty was the onely sonne of my little world."

When Sir Roger Aston, about this time, was despatched with letters from James of Scotland to the Queen, he was not allowed to deliver them in person, but was introduced into an ante-chamber from which, through open door-curtains, he could see Elizabeth dancing alone to the music of a little violin,--the object being that he should tell his master how youthful she still was, and how small the likelihood of his succeeding to her crown for many a long day.[1] One can readily understand, then, how she stormed with wrath when Bishop Rudd, so early as 1596, quoted in a sermon Kohélet's verses as to the pains of age, with unmistakable reference to her.

She was bent on being flattered without ceasing and obeyed without demur. In her lust of rule, she knew no greater pleasure than when one of her favourites made a suggestion opposed to one of hers, and then abandoned it. Leicester had employed this means of confirming himself in her favour, and had bequeathed it to his successors. So strong was her craving to enjoy incessantly the sensation of her autocracy, that she would intrigue to set her courtiers up in arms against each other, and would favour first one group and then the other, taking pleasure in their feuds and cabals. In her later years her court was one of the most corrupt in the world. The only means of prospering in it were those set forth in Roger Ascham's distich:

"Cog, lie, flatter and face Four ways in court, to win men grace."

The two main parties were those of Cecil and Essex. Whoever gained the favour of one of these great lords, be his merits what they might, was opposed by the other party with every weapon in their power.

In some respects, however, Elizabeth in her later years had made progress in the art of government. So weak had been her faith in the warlike capabilities of her country, and so potent, on the other hand, her avarice, that she had neglected to make preparation for the war with Spain, and had left her gallant seamen inadequately equipped; but after the victory over the Spanish Armada she ungrudgingly devoted all the resources of her treasury to the war, which survived her and extended well into the following century. This war had forced Elizabeth to take a side in the internal religious dissensions of the country. She was the head of the Church, regarded ecclesiastical affairs as subject to her personal control, and, so far as she was able, would suffer no discussion of religious questions in the House of Commons. Like her contemporary Henri Quatre of France, she was in her heart entirely indifferent to religion, had a certain general belief in God, but thought all dogmas mere cobwebs of the brain, and held one rite neither better nor worse than another. They both regarded religious differences exclusively from the political point of view. Henry ended by becoming a Catholic and assuring his former co-religionists freedom of conscience. Elizabeth was of necessity a Protestant, but tolerance was an unknown doctrine in England. It was an established principle that every subject must accept the religion of the State.

Authoritarian to her inmost fibre, Elizabeth had a strong bent towards Catholicism. The circumstances of her life had placed her in opposition to the Papal power, but she was fond of describing herself to foreign ambassadors as a Catholic in all points except subjection to the Pope. She did not even make any secret of her contempt for Protestantism, whose head she was, and whose support she could not for a moment dispense with. She felt it a humiliation to be regarded as a co-religionist of the French, Scotch, or Dutch heretics. She looked down upon the Anglican Bishops whom she had herself appointed, and they, in their worldliness, deserved her scorn. But still deeper was her detestation of all sectarianism within the limits of her Church, and especially of Puritanism in all its forms. If she did not in the first years of her reign indulge in open persecution of the Puritans, it was only because she was as yet dependent on their support; but as soon as she felt herself firmly seated on her throne, she established, in spite of the stiff-necked opposition of Parliament, the jurisdiction of the Bishops on all matters of ecclesiastical politics, and suffered Puritan writers to be condemned to death or lifelong imprisonment for free but quite innocent expressions of opinion regarding the relation of the State to religion.

Her greatness had mainly reposed upon the insight she had shown in the choice of her counsellors and commanders. But the most distinguished of those who had shed glory on her throne died one after the other in the last decade of the century. The first to die was Walsingham, one of her most disinterested servants, whom she had repaid with black ingratitude. He had done her great and loyal services, and had saved her life at the time of the last conspiracy, which led to the execution of Mary Stuart. Then she lost such notable members of her Council as Lord Hunsdon and Sir Francis Knowles; then Lord Burghley himself, the true ruler of England during her reign; and finally, Sir Francis Drake, the great naval hero of the war with Spain. She felt herself lonely and deserted. She no longer took any pleasure in the position of power to which England had attained under her rule. In spite of all she could do to conceal it, she began to feel the oppression of age, and to see how little real affection those men felt for her who were always posing in the light of adorers. She was the last of her line, and the thought of her successor was so intolerable to her, that she deferred his final nomination until she lay on her death-bed. But it availed her nothing; she knew very well that her ministers and courtiers, during the last years of her life, were in constant and secret communication with James of Scotland. They would kneel in the dust as she passed with exclamations of enchantment at her youthful appearance, and then rise, brush the dust from their knees, and write to James that the Queen looked ghastly and could not possibly last long. They did all they possibly could to conceal from her their Scotch intrigues; but she divined what went on behind her back, even if she did not realise the extent to which it was carried, or know definitely which of her most trusted servants were shrinking from nothing that could assure them the favour of James. For example, she did not suspect Robert Cecil of the double game he was carrying on, at the very time when he was doing his best to drive Essex to desperation and secure his punishment for an act of disobedience scarcely more heinous in the Queen's eyes than his own underhand dealings. But she felt herself isolated in the midst of a crowd of courtiers impatiently awaiting the new era that was to dawn after her death. She realised that the men who still flattered her had never been attached to her for her own sake, and she specially resented the fact that they no longer seemed even to fear her.

One result of this deep dejection was that she gave her tyrannical tendencies a freer course than before, and became less and less inclined to forbearance or mercy towards those who had once been dear to her but had fallen into disgrace.

She had always taken it very ill when one of her favourites showed any inclination towards matrimony, and they had therefore always been forced to marry secretly, though that did not in the end save them from her displeasure. Now her despotism rose to such a pitch that she wanted to control the marriages even of those courtiers who had never enjoyed her favour.

One of the things which Shakespeare doubtless took most to heart at the end of the old century and beginning of the new was the hard fate which overtook his distinguished and highly valued patron Southampton. This nobleman had fallen in love with Essex's cousin, the Lady Elizabeth Vernon. The Queen forbade him to marry her, but he would not relinquish his bride. He was hot-headed and high-spirited. Young as he was, he had boarded and taken a Spanish ship of war in the course of the expedition commanded by his friend Essex. Once, in the palace itself, when Southampton, Raleigh, and another courtier had been laughing and making a noise over a game of primero, the captain of the guard, Ambrose Willoughby, called them to order because the Queen had gone early to bed; whereupon Southampton struck this high official in the face and actually had a bout of fisticuffs with him. Such being his character, we cannot wonder that he contracted a private marriage in spite of the prohibition (August 1598). Elizabeth sent him to pass his honeymoon in the Tower, and thenceforth viewed him with high disfavour.

His close relationship to Essex led to a new outburst of the Queen's displeasure. When Essex took command of the army in Ireland in 1599, he appointed Southampton his General of Horse; but simply out of resentment for Southampton's disobedience in the matter of his marriage, the Queen forced Essex to rescind the appointment.

One must bear in mind, among other things, this attitude of the Queen towards Shakespeare's first patron in order to understand the evident coolness of his feeling towards Elizabeth. He did not, for example, join in the threnodies of the other English poets on her death, and even after Chettle had expressly urged him,[2] refrained from writing a single line in her praise. He probably read her character much as Froude did in our own day.

Froude admits that she was "supremely brave," and was turned aside from her purposes by no care for her own life, though she was "perpetually a mark for assassination." He admits, too, that she lived simply, worked hard, and ruled her household with economy. "But her vanity was as insatiable as it was commonplace.... Her entire nature was saturated with artifice. Except when speaking some round untruths, Elizabeth never could be simple. Her letters and her speeches were as fantastic as her dress, and her meaning as involved as her policy. She was unnatural even in her prayers, and she carried her affectations into the presence of the Almighty.... Obligations of honour were not only occasionally forgotten by her, but she did not seem to understand what honour meant."[3]

At the point we have now reached in Shakespeare's life, the event occurred which, of all external circumstances of his time, seems to have made the deepest impression upon his mind: the ill-starred rebellion of Essex and Southampton, the execution of the former, and the latter's condemnation to imprisonment for life.

[1] Arthur Weldon: _The Court and Character of King James_, 1650; quoted by Drake, ii. 149.

[2]

"Nor doth the silver-tongued _Melicert_ Drop from his honied muse one sable teare To mourne her death that graced his desert, And to his laies opend her Royall eare. Shepheard, remember our _Elizabeth_, And sing her Rape, done by that _Tarquin_, Death."

[3] Froude: _History of England_, vol. xii. Conclusion.

III

_ELIZABETH, ESSEX, AND BACON_

In order rightly to understand these events a short retrospect is necessary.

We have seen how Essex in 1587 ousted Raleigh from the Queen's favour. From the very first he united with the insinuating tone of the adorer the domineering attitude of the established favourite. This was new to her, and for a considerable time obviously impressed more than it irritated her.

Here is an instance, from the early days of their relationship. Essex's sister, Penelope, had, against her will, been married to Lord Rich. She was adored by Sir Philip Sidney, who sang of her as his Stella, and their mutual passion was an open secret. The Maiden Queen, who was always very strict as to the moral purity of those around her, during a visit which she paid with Essex to the Earl of Warwick at North Hall in 1587, took offence at the presence of Lady Rich, and insisted that she should leave the house. Essex declared that the Queen subjected him and his sister to this insult "only to please that knave Raleigh," and left the house at midnight along with Lady Rich. He wanted to join the army in the Netherlands, but the Queen, finding that she could not do without him, had him brought back again.

At the time of the Armada, therefore, the Queen kept him at court, much against his own will. Nor would he have been allowed to take

## part in the war of 1589 if he had not secretly made his escape from

England, leaving behind him a letter to the Queen and Council to the effect that "he would return alive at no one's bidding." An angry letter from Elizabeth forced him, however, to come back after he had distinguished himself before Lisbon. They were then reconciled, but the practical-minded Queen immediately demanded of him the repayment of a sum of £3000 which she had lent him, so that he was forced to sell his mansion of Keyston. He received in return "the farm of sweet wines," a very lucrative monopoly, the withdrawal of which many years afterwards led to the boiling over of his discontent.

We have seen how his secret marriage in 1590 enraged the Queen, who at once vented her wrath upon his bride. Presently, however, he was once more in favour, and in the middle of the French campaign of 1591, Elizabeth recalled him to England for a week, which was passed in all sorts of festivities. She wept when he returned to the army, and laid upon him an injunction, to which he paid very little heed, that he must on no account incur any personal danger.

During the subsequent four years which Essex passed in England, occupied with his plans of ambition, it became clear to him that Burghley's son, Sir Robert Cecil, was the chief obstacle to his advancement. All of those, therefore, who for one reason or another hated the house of Cecil, cast in their lot with Essex. Thus it happened that Cecil's cousin, Francis Bacon, who had in vain besought first the father and then the son for some profitable office, became a close personal adherent of Essex. It was necessary to make choice of one party or the other if you were to hope for any preferment. In the years 1593 and 1594, accordingly, we find Essex again and again importuning Elizabeth for offices for Bacon. She had no very great confidence in Bacon, and bore him a grudge, moreover, because he had incautiously spoken in Parliament against a Government measure; so that Essex, to his great annoyance and disgust, met with a refusal to all his applications. As a consolation to his client, he made him a present of land to the value of not less than £1800. That was the price for which Bacon sold the property; Essex had believed it to be worth more.[1] This gift, we see, was nearly twice as large as that which Southampton is reported to have made to Shakespeare (see above, p. 152).

Henceforward Bacon is to be regarded as an attentive and officious adherent of Essex, while Essex makes it a point of honour to obtain for him every recognition, preferment, and advantage. Again and again Bacon places his pen at the disposal of Essex. There are extant three long letters from Essex to his young cousin Lord Rutland, dated 1596, giving him excellent advice as to how to reap most profit from his first Continental tour, on which he was then setting out. In many passages of these letters we recognise Bacon's ideas, and in some his style, his acknowledged writings containing almost identical parallels. The probability is that in these, as in many subsequent instances, Bacon supplied Essex with the ideas and the first draft of the letters. Well knowing that the Queen's dissatisfaction with Essex arose chiefly from his desire for military glory and the popularity which follows in its train--well knowing, too, that Essex's enemies at court were always representing this ambition to the Queen as a hindrance to the peace with Spain, which nevertheless must one day be concluded--Bacon thought it a good move for his protector to display unequivocally his care for the occupations of peace, the acquisition of useful knowledge, and other unmilitary advantages, in letters which, although private, were likely enough to come into her Majesty's hands.

Francis Bacon's brother, Anthony, about the same time attached himself closely (and more faithfully) to Essex. Through him the Earl established communications with all the foreign courts, so that for a time his knowledge of European affairs rivalled that of the Foreign Ministry itself.

The zeal which Essex had displayed in unravelling Doctor Roderigo Lopez's suspected plot against Elizabeth (see above, p. 191) had placed him very high in her renewed favour. His heroic exploits at Cadiz ought to have strengthened his position; but his adversary, Robert Cecil, had during his absence acquired new power, and the rapacious Elizabeth complained of the smallness of the booty (it amounted to £13,000). As a matter of fact, Essex alone had wanted to follow up the advantage gained, and to seize the Indian fleet, which was allowed to escape: he had been out-voted in the council of war.

In order to overcome this new resentment on the Queen's part, Bacon, who regarded his fate as bound up in that of the Earl, wrote a letter to Essex (dated October 4, 1596), full of good advice with respect to the attitude he ought to adopt towards Elizabeth, especially in order to disabuse her mind of the idea that his disposition was ungovernable--advice which Bacon himself, with his courtier temperament, might easily enough have followed, but which was too hard for the downright Essex, who had no sooner made humble submission than his pride again brought arrogant expressions to his lips.

At the close of the year 1596 Bacon's protector was accused by his client's mother, Lady Bacon, of misconduct with one of the ladies of the court. He denied the charge, but confessed to "similar errors."

In 1597 Essex, who had been longing for a new command, undertook an expedition to the Azores with twenty ships and 6000 men--an enterprise which, largely owing to his inexperience and unfortunate leadership, was entirely unsuccessful. On his return he was very coldly received by the Queen, especially on the ground that towards the end of the expedition he had behaved ill to Raleigh, his colleague in command. In order to make his peace with Elizabeth, he sent her insinuating letters; but he was mortally offended when the eminent services of the old Lord Howard were rewarded by the appointment of Lord High Admiral. As the victor of Cadiz, he regarded himself as the one possible man for this distinction, which gave Howard precedence over him. He bemoaned his fate, however, to such purpose that he soon after secured the appointment of Earl Marshal of England, which in turn gave him precedence over Howard. He received a very valuable present--worth £7000--and for the first and last time induced the Queen to grant an audience to his mother, Lady Lettice, whose marriage with Leicester, twenty-three years before, was not yet forgiven, although in 1589, at the age of forty-nine, she had married a third husband, Sir Christopher Blount.

But Essex was not long at peace with the Queen and Court. In 1598 he was accused of illicit relations with no fewer than four ladies of the court (Elizabeth Southwell, Elizabeth Brydges, Mrs. Russell, and Lady Mary Howard), and the charge seems to have been well founded. At the same time violent dissensions broke out as to whether an attempt should or should not be made to bring the war with Spain to a close. Essex carried the day, and it was continued. It was at this time that he wrote a pamphlet defending himself warmly from the charge of desiring war at any price. It was not published until 1602, under the title: _An apology of the Earle of Essex against those which jealously and maliciously tax him to be the hinderer of the peace and quiet of his country._

To the Queen's birthday of this year (November 17, 1598) belongs an anecdote which shows what ingenuity Essex displayed in annoying his rival. As was the custom of the day, the leading courtiers tilted at the ring in honour of her Majesty, and each knight was required to appear in some disguise. It was known, however, that Sir Walter Raleigh would ride in his own uniform of orange-tawny medley, trimmed with black budge of lamb's wool. Essex, to vex him, came to the lists with a body-guard of two thousand retainers all dressed in orange-tawny, so that Raleigh and his men seemed only an insignificant division of Essex's splendid retinue.[2]

No later than June or July 1598 there occurred a new scene between Essex and the Queen in the Council, the most unpleasant and grotesque passage which had yet taken place between them. The occasion was trifling, being nothing more than the choice of an official to be despatched to Ireland. Essex was in the habit of permitting himself every liberty towards Elizabeth; and it was now, or soon after, that, as Raleigh relates, he told her "that her conditions were as crooked as her carcase." Certain it is that, on this occasion, he turned his back to her with an expression of contempt. She retorted by giving him a box on the ear and bidding him "Go and be hanged." He laid his hand upon his sword-hilt, declared that he would not have suffered such an insult from Henry the Eighth himself, and held aloof from the court for months.

Not till October was Essex forgiven, and even then with no heartiness or sincerity. The Irish rebellion, however, had to be put down, so a truce was called to all trivial quarrels. O'Neil, Earl of Tyrone, had got together an army, as he had often done before, and the whole island was in revolt. Public opinion, for no sufficient reason, pointed to Essex as the only man who could deal with the rebels. He, on his part, was by no means eager to accept the mission. It was of the utmost importance for every courtier, and especially for the head of a party, not to be out of the Queen's sight more than was imperatively necessary. There was every reason to fear that his enemies of the opposite party would avail themselves of his absence in order so to blacken him in the eyes of his omnipotent mistress that he would never regain her favour. Elizabeth, at this juncture, like Louis XIV. in the following century, was monarch and constitution in one. Her displeasure meant ruin, her favour was the only source of prosperity. Therefore Essex did all he could to secure permission to return from the front whenever he pleased, in order to report personally to the Queen; and it was therefore that, in the following year, when he was forbidden to leave his post, he threw caution to the winds, and defied the prohibition. He knew that he was lost unless he could speak to Elizabeth face to face.

In March 1599 Essex took the command of the English troops; he was to suppress the rebellion and grant Tyrone his life only on condition of his complete surrender. But instead of carrying out his orders, which were to attack the rebels in their stronghold, Ulster, Essex remained for long inactive, and at last marched into Munster. One of his subordinate officers, Sir Henry Harington, suffered a disgraceful defeat, partly through his own incompetence, partly through the cowardice of his officers and men. He was tried by court-martial in Dublin, and he himself, and every tenth man of his command, were shot. The summer slipped away, and in its course the 16,000 men with whom Essex had come to Ireland were reduced by sickness and desertion to a quarter of their original number. Under these circumstances, Essex again deferred his march upon Ulster, so that the Queen, who was excessively displeased, expressly forbade him to return from Ireland without her permission.

When at last, in the beginning of September 1599, he confronted with his shrunken forces Tyrone's unbreathed army, which had taken up a strong position to await the coming of the English, he abandoned his plan of attack, invited Tyrone to a parley, had half an hour's conversation with him on the 6th of September, and concluded a fourteen weeks' armistice, to be renewed every six weeks until the 1st of May. According to his own account, he promised Tyrone that this treaty should not be placed in writing, lest it should fall into the hands of the Spaniards and be used against him.

This was certainly not what Elizabeth had expected of the Irish campaign, which had opened with such a flourish of trumpets, and we cannot wonder that her anger was fierce and deep-seated. No sooner had she received the intelligence, than she forbade the conclusion of any treaty whatsoever.

Convinced that his enemies now had the entire ear of the Queen, Essex sought safety in once more disobeying Elizabeth's express command. With a train of only six followers, which in the indictment against him afterwards grew into a body of 200 picked men, he crossed to England to attempt his own justification, rode direct to Nonsuch Palace, where Elizabeth then was, forced all the doors, and, travel-stained as he was, threw himself on his knees before the Queen, whom he surprised in her bed-chamber, with her hair undressed, at ten o'clock in the morning of the 28th of September.

It is a strong proof of the power which his personality still retained over Elizabeth, that at the first moment she felt nothing but pleasure in seeing him. As soon as he had changed his clothes, he was admitted to an audience, which lasted an hour and a half. As yet all seemed well. He dined at the Queen's table and told her about Ireland and its people. But in the evening he was "commanded to keep his chamber" until the lords of the Council should have spoken with him; and a few days later he was confined to York House, with his friend the Lord Keeper, however, for his gaoler.

He presently fell ill, when it appeared that the Queen had by no means forgotten her former tenderness for him. In the middle of December she sent eight physicians to consult as to his case. They despaired of his life, but he recovered.

While matters thus looked very black for Essex, his nearest friends also were, of course, in disgrace. In a letter from Rowland Whyte to Sir Robert Sidney (dated October 11, 1599), we find the following significant statement: "My Lord _Southhampton_, and Lord _Rutland_ come not to the court; the one doth but very seldome; they pass away the Tyme in _London_ merely in going to Plaies euery day."[3] Southampton had married a cousin of Essex, and Rutland a daughter of Lady Essex by her first marriage with Sir Philip Sidney; so that both were in the same boat with their more distinguished kinsman.

On the 5th of June 1600, Essex was brought to trial--not before the Star Chamber, but, by particular favour, before a special court, consisting of four earls, two barons, and four judges, which assembled at the Lord Keeper's residence, York House, the general public being excluded. The procedure was mainly dictated by the Queen's wish to justify the arrest of Essex in the face of public opinion, which idolised him and regarded him as a martyr.

[1] James Spedding: _Letters and Life of Francis Bacon_, i. 371.

[2] Gosse: _Raleigh_, p. 113.

[3] A. Collins: _Letters and Memorials of State_, ii. 132.

IV

_THE FATE OF ESSEX AND SOUTHAMPTON_

The indictment did not press too severely upon Essex, did not as yet seek to discover treasonable motives for his inactivity in Ireland, but simply dwelt upon his disobedience to the Queen's commands, and the dangerous and dishonourable agreement with Tyrone. Francis Bacon had not been allotted any part in the proceedings; but on his writing to the Queen and expressing his desire to serve her in this conjuncture, he was assigned the quite subordinate task of calling Essex to account for his indiscretion in accepting the dedication, in unbefitting terms, of a political pamphlet written by a certain Dr. Hayward. Bacon exceeded his instructions by dwelling at length on certain passionate expressions in a letter from Essex to the Lord Keeper, in which he had spoken of the hardness of the Queen's heart and compared her princely wrath to a tempest. A man who was less nervously anxious to retain the Queen's favour would have declined this commission on the ground of his close relations with Essex; Bacon begged for it, went farther than it required him to go, and is scarcely to be believed when he afterwards, in his _Apology_, represents himself as actuated by the wish ultimately to be of service to Essex with the Queen. Still, he evidently had not ceased to regard a reconciliation between Elizabeth and Essex as the most probable result, and he may perhaps have done his best in private conversations to soften the Queen's resentment.

The sentence passed by the Lord Keeper was the not very severe one that Essex should, in the meantime, be deprived of all his offices, and remain a prisoner in Essex House "till it shall please her Majesty to release both this and all the rest."

Bacon, who still did not think Essex irretrievably lost, now tried, in a carefully worded letter to him, to explain his attitude, and at once received from his magnanimous friend a forgiveness which was scarcely deserved. Bacon declared that, next to the interests of the Queen and the country, those of Essex always lay nearest his heart; and he now composed two documents: first, a very judicious letter, which Essex was partly to re-write and then to send to the Queen, and next a fictitious letter, a masterpiece of diplomacy, purporting to have been written by his brother, Anthony Bacon, Essex's faithful adherent, to Essex himself. This letter, and Essex's reply to it, which prove to admiration Bacon's talent for reproducing the styles of two such different men, were to be copied by them respectively, and to be brought to the knowledge of the Queen, on whom they would no doubt produce the desired impression. With Machiavellian subtlety, these letters are carefully framed so as to place Francis Bacon himself in the light which should most appeal to the Queen: Essex is represented as regarding him as entirely won over to her side, and Anthony expresses the hope that she will show him the favour he has deserved "for that he hath done and suffered."

Bacon did not succeed in inducing Elizabeth to restore Essex to his former position in her favour. In August, a couple of months after the date of the sentence, he was placed at full liberty; but access to Elizabeth's person was denied him, and he was bidden to regard himself as still in disgrace. The consequence was that few now came about him except the members of his own family. Add to this, that he was over head and ears in debt, and that his monopoly of sweet wines, which had been his chief source of income, and on the renewal of which his financial rescue depended, ran out in the following month.

He wavered between fear and hope, and was forever "shifting from sorrow and repentance to rage and rebellion so suddenly, as well proveth him devoid of good reason as of right mind." At one moment he is appealing to the Queen with the deepest humility in flattering letters, and at the next he is speaking of her--so his friend Sir John Harington reports--as "became no man who had _mens sana in corpore sano_."

Then came the catastrophe. His sources of income were cut off, and his hope of the Queen's relenting was broken. He was convinced--without reason, as it appears--that his enemies at court, who had deprived him of his wealth, had now laid a plot to deprive him of his life as well. He imagined, too, that Sir Robert Cecil was weaving intrigues to bring about the nomination of the Infanta of Spain as Elizabeth's successor; and in his desperation he began to nurse the illusion that it was as necessary for the welfare of the state as for his own that he should gain forcible access to the Queen and secure the banishment from court of her present advisers. In his dread of being once more placed under arrest, and this time sent to the Tower, he determined, in February 1601, to carry out a plan he had been hatching, for taking the court by storm.

Southampton had at this time allowed the malcontents to make his residence, Drury House, their meeting-place for discussing the situation. Here the general plan was laid that they should seize upon Whitehall and that Essex should force his way into the Queen's presence; the time was to depend upon the arrival of the Scotch envoy. On the 5th of February, four or five of the Earl's friends presented themselves at the Globe Theatre, and promised the players eleven shillings more than they usually received if, on the 7th, they would perform the play of the deposition and death of King Richard II. (see above, p. 148). In the meantime, Essex had, in the beginning of February, assembled his adherents in his own residence, Essex House, and this induced the Government, which had heard with uneasiness of so large a concourse of people, to summon Essex before the Council. He received the summons on the 7th of February 1601, excused himself on the ground of indisposition, and at once called his friends together. On the same evening three hundred men were gathered at his house, although no real plan had as yet been determined upon. He informed them that his life was threatened by Cobham and Raleigh. On the morning of the 8th of February, the Lord Keeper with three other noblemen, commissioned by the Queen to inquire into what was going on, appeared at Essex House, and demanded to see the Earl. They told him that any complaints he might have to make to the Queen should receive attention, but that in the first place he must order his adherents to disperse.

Essex made only confused replies: his life was threatened, he was to be murdered in his bed, he had been treacherously dealt with, and so forth. In the meantime shouts arose from the crowd of his retainers, "Away, my lord; they abuse you, they betray you, they undo you; you lose time!" Essex led the noblemen into his house amid cries from his armed friends of "Kill them, kill them!" and "Shut them up! Keep them as pledges, cast the great seal out at the window!" He had them locked up in his library as prisoners or hostages. Then he came out again, and, amid cries of "To Court! to Court!" his party rushed through the gates. At the last moment, Essex learned that the Court was prepared, the watch was doubled, and every access to Whitehall was barred. They were therefore forced to attempt, in the first place, to stir up an insurrection in the city. But in order to pass through the streets horses were needed; they were sent for, but there was delay in procuring them. So impatient was every one by this time, that instead of awaiting their arrival, several hundred men, headed by Essex, Southampton, Rutland, Blount, and other gentlemen, but without any real leader or effective plan of action, set off for the city. Essex nowhere made any speech to the populace, but merely shouted, as though beside himself, that an attempt had been made to murder him. A good many people, indeed, appeared to join him, but none of them were armed, and they were in reality no more than onlookers. In the meantime, the Government despatched high officials on horseback to different quarters of the town to proclaim Essex a traitor; whereupon many of his following deserted him. Troops, too, were despatched against him, so that he, with the remainder of his band, with difficulty made their way by water back to Essex House, which was immediately besieged and fired upon. In the evening Essex and Southampton opened negotiations, and about ten o'clock surrendered with their little force, on the understanding that they should be courteously treated and accorded an honourable trial. The prisoners were taken to the Tower.

Francis Bacon now again plays a part, and this time a decisive one, in Essex's history. There was no need for him to take any share in the trial; and even if his office had imposed it upon him, he ought in common decency to have refrained. He was neither Attorney-General nor Solicitor, but only one of the "Learned Counsel." The very fact of his close friendship with Essex, however, made the Government anxious that he should appear in the case. He was at once advocate and witness, and was not summoned as one of the learned counsel, but expressly as "friend to the accused."

On the 19th February, Essex and Southampton were brought before a court consisting of twenty-five peers and nine judges. Already, on the 17th, Thomas Leigh, a captain in Essex's Irish army, for trying to gain access to the palace on the 8th February, had been beheaded in the Tower. Now that Essex's cause was irreparably lost, Bacon had no other thought than to make himself useful to the party in power and prove his devotion to the Queen. The purport of his first speech against Essex was to prove that the plan of exciting an insurrection in the city, which was in reality an inspiration of the moment, had been the result of three months' deliberation. He represented as false and hypocritical Essex's assurance that he was driven to action by dread of the machinations of powerful enemies. He compared Essex to Cain, the first murderer, who also sought excuses for his deed, and to Pisistratus, who wounded himself and ran through the streets of Athens, crying that an attempt had been made upon his life. The Earl of Essex, he said, in reality had no enemies.

Essex rejoined that he could "call forth Mr. Bacon against Mr. Bacon." Bacon, "being a daily courtier," had promised to plead his cause with the Queen. He had with great address composed a letter to her, to be signed by Essex. He had also written another letter in his brother Anthony's name, and an answer to it from Essex, both of which he was to show to the Queen; and in these "he laid down the grounds of my discontent, and the reasons I pretend against mine enemies, pleading as orderly for me as I could do myself."

This rejoinder told sensibly against Bacon, and drove him in his reply to launch against his benefactor a new and much more malignant and dangerous comparison. He likened him to a renowned contemporary, also a nobleman and a rebel, the Duke of Guise: "It was not the company you carried with you, but the assistance you hoped for in the City which you trusted unto. The Duke of Guise thrust himself into the streets of Paris on the day of the Barricados in his doublet and hose, attended only with eight gentlemen, and found that help in the city which (thanks be to God) you failed of here. And what followed? The King was forced to put himself into a pilgrim's weeds, and in that disguise to steal away to scape their fury."

In view of Essex's persistent denial that he had aspired to the throne or sought to do the Queen any injury, this parallel was a terrible one for him.

Both he and Southampton were found guilty and condemned to death.

The trial of Shakespeare's protector, Southampton, and his signed confession, have a special interest for us. In a private letter from John Chamberlain, dated the 24th February, we read: "The Earl of Southampton spake very well (but methought somewhat too much, as well, as the other), and as a man that would fain live, pleaded hard to acquit himself; but all in vain, for it could not be: whereupon he descended to entreaty and moved great commiseration, and though he were generally well liked, yet methought he was somewhat too low and submiss, and seemed too loath to die before a proud enemy."

Southampton, in his own confession, admits that immediately after his arrival in Ireland, he became aware of Essex's letter to King James of Scotland, urging that, for his own sake, he ought not to permit the government of England to remain in the hands of his and Essex's common enemies, proposing that he should, at a fitting opportunity, assemble an army, and promising that Essex, in so far as his duty to her Majesty permitted, should support the King with his Irish troops. James replied evasively, and nothing came of the plan, in which Southampton soon regretted that he had taken share. After losing his post in Ireland, he went to the Netherlands, and had no other desire than to regain the favour of the Queen, when Essex, his kinsman and friend, summoned him to London and requested his support in the plan he had formed for seeking access to her Majesty. With a heavy heart, he had consented, and engaged in the enterprise, not from any treachery or disrespect towards her Majesty, but solely on account of his affection for Essex. He repents and abhors his action, and promises on his knees to consecrate to the Queen's service every day that remains to him, if she will but spare his life.

Southampton impresses us as a man of fiery but yielding character, entirely under the influence of a stronger personality; but he is never betrayed into a single unworthy word with respect to his kinsman and friend, whose cause he of course knew to be hopeless. His sentence was commuted to imprisonment for life.

Essex himself, at the end, endured with less resolution the cruel ordeal to which he was subjected. Finding himself condemned to death, and knowing that many of his closest friends had confessed to the Drury House discussions and designs, he lost all balance during the last days of his life, entirely forgot his dignity, and overwhelmed those around him, his sister, his friends, his secretary, and himself, with a torrent of reproaches.

In the meantime his enemies were not idle. Even Raleigh, on whose proud nature one is sorry, to find such a stain, impelled, of course, not only by their old enmity, but by Essex's recent assertions that he was plotting against his life, wrote to Cecil, in his uneasiness lest Essex should be pardoned, and urged him "not to relent," but to see that the sentence was carried out.

Elizabeth had first signed the death-warrant, and then recalled it. On the 24th February she signed it a second time, and on the 25th February 1601, Essex's head was severed by three blows of the axe.

The populace could not be persuaded of their favourite's guilt. They loathed his executioner, and detested those men who, like Bacon and Raleigh, had, by their malice, contributed to his downfall.

In order to justify itself, the Government issued an official _Declaration touching the Treasons of the late Earl of Essex and his complices_, in the composition of which Bacon bore a large part. It is very untrustworthy. James Spedding, indeed, one of Bacon's best biographers, has tried to reconcile it with the facts; but he has not succeeded in explaining away the damnatory circumstance that everything is omitted which tended at the trial to establish Essex's intention to use no violence, and to prove how entirely unpremeditated was the attempt to raise an insurrection in the city. Where passages of this nature occur in the records, all of which are preserved, we find the letters _om_, (meaning, of course, "to be omitted") written in the margin, sometimes in Bacon's hand, sometimes in that of the Attorney-General, Coke.[1].

Bacon, with his brilliant intellectual equipment and his consciousness of his great powers, is not to be set down as simply a bad man. But his heart was cold, and he had no greatness of soul. He was absorbed, to a quite unworthy degree, in the pursuit of worldly prosperity. Always deeply in debt, he coveted above everything fine houses and gardens, massive plate, great revenues, and, as essential preliminaries, high offices and employments, titles and distinctions, which he might well have left to men of meaner worth. He passed half his life in the character of an office-seeker, met with one humiliating refusal after another, and returned humble thanks for the gracious denial. Once and once only, in his early days in Parliament, did he display some independence and rectitude; but when he saw that it gave offence in the highest places, he repented as bitterly as though he had been guilty of a sin against all political morality, and besought her Majesty's forgiveness in terms that might have befitted a detected thief. With the like baseness and pusillanimity he now turned against Essex. He had often cited the maxim, which even Cicero criticised in the _De Amicitia_: "Love as if you should hereafter hate, and hate as if you should hereafter love." He had never loved Essex otherwise. His excuse, if there can be any, for seeking advancement at all costs, must be found in the fact that he had the highest conception of his own value to science, and thought that it would be to the honour and advantage of learning that he, its high-priest, should be highly placed.

If we examine Essex's portrait, with its regular beauty, its air of distinction and gentleness, the high forehead, the curly hair, and the carefully combed long light beard, we can readily understand that such a man, surrounded by a halo of adventurous renown, must become the idol of the populace, and that the military incompetence which he had twice displayed should not greatly affect the high esteem in which the people held him. He was in reality as little of a statesman as of a general; he was simply a free-speaking, passionate man, innocent of diplomacy, a brave soldier without an idea of tactics. He misunderstood his influence over Elizabeth, and did not realise that the Queen, while she felt the charm of his personality, contemned his political counsels. There was a good deal of the poet in his composition; he wrote pretty sonnets, was a patron of writers no less than of fighters, showed himself generous to profusion towards his friends and clients, and found, perhaps, his sincerest and most convinced admirers among the authors and poets of the day. Innumerable are the books which are dedicated to him.

There is no doubt that after his melancholy death, a marked decline was apparent in the Queen's courage and spirits. The legend, however, that it was the fact of his execution which she took so much to heart, is scarcely to be believed, and the story about Essex's ring, which was conveyed to her too late, is unquestionably a fable. It is certain, on the other hand--for the Duc de Biron, the envoy of Henri IV., had no motive for telling a falsehood--that on the 12th September 1601, after a conversation about Essex in which she jested over her departed favourite, Elizabeth opened a box and took out of it Essex's skull, which she showed to Biron. Ten months later, this favourite of the French king--whose name Shakespeare had borrowed for the hero of his first comedy--met with the very fate of Essex, and for a similar crime.

Bacon, no doubt, mourned Essex's disappearance even less than did the Queen. After Elizabeth's death, however, when the friends of Essex stood in the highest favour with the new King, he was shameless enough to send a letter to Southampton (who, though not yet released from the Tower, was already regarded as a power in the land), in which, after having expressed his fear of being met with distrust, he concludes thus: "It is as true as a thing that God knoweth, that this great change hath wrought in me no other change towards your Lordship than this, that I may safely be now that which I was truly before."

The circumstances of Essex's condemnation were of course not known in the London of those days so minutely as we now know them. But we see, as already indicated, that public opinion turned vehemently against Bacon, regarding and despising him as the traitor to his lord who, more than any one else, had brought about his unhappy end. We see that Raleigh, in spite of his greatness, now became one of the most unpopular men in England; and we observe that, notwithstanding all that was done to disparage him in the general regard, Essex's memory continued to be idolised by the great mass of the people.

If we now inquire in what relation Shakespeare stood to these events which so absorbed the English people, it seems more than probable that he, who had so recently been so intimately associated with Southampton, and cannot therefore have been very far from Essex, followed the accused with his sympathy, felt a lively resentment towards their enemies, and took their fate much to heart. And when we observe that just at this juncture a revolution occurs in Shakespeare's hitherto cheerful habit of mind, and that he begins to take ever gloomier views of human nature and of life, we cannot but recognise the probability that grief for the fate which had overtaken Essex, Southampton, and their fellows, was one of the sources of his growing melancholy.

[1] Compare _Dictionary of National Biography_, Robert Devereux; Spedding, _Letters and Life of Francis Bacon_, ii. 190-374; Edwin Abbott, _Francis Bacon, an Account of his Life and Works_, pp. 53-82; Macaulay, _Lord Bacon_; Gosse, _Raleigh_.

V

_THE DEDICATION OF THE SONNETS_

We naturally looked for one source of his henceforth deepening melancholy in outward events, in the political drama which reached its crisis and catastrophe in 1601; but it is still more imperative that we should look into his private and personal experiences for the ultimate cause of the revolution in his soul. We must inquire what light his works throw upon his private circumstances and state of mind at this period.

Now, we find among Shakespeare's works one which, more than any other, enables us to look into his inmost soul--I mean his Sonnets. It is to these remarkable poems that we must mainly address ourselves for the information we require. Public events may, indeed, cast a certain measure of light or shadow over a man's inward world of thought and feeling; but they are never the efficient factors in determining the happiness or melancholy of his fundamental mood. If he has personal reasons for feeling that fate is against him, the utmost serenity in the political atmosphere will not dissipate his gloom; and, conversely, if a deep joy abides within him, and he has personal reasons for feeling himself favoured by fortune, then public discontent will be powerless to disturb the harmony in his soul. But his depression will, of course, be doubly severe if public events and private experiences combine to cast a gloom over his mind.

Shakespeare's "sugred Sonnets" are first mentioned in the well-known passage in Meres's _Palladis Tamia_ (1598), where they are spoken of as passing from hand to hand "among his private friends." In the following year the two important Sonnets now numbered cxxxviii. and cxliv. were printed (with readings subsequently revised) in a collection of poems named _The Passionate Pilgrim_, dishonestly published, and falsely attributed to Shakespeare, by a bookseller named Jaggard. For the next ten years we find no mention of Sonnets by Shakespeare, until, in 1609, a bookseller named Thomas Thorpe issued a quarto book entitled _Shakespeares Sonnets. Neuer before Imprinted_--an edition which the poet himself certainly cannot have revised for the press, but which may possibly have been printed from an authentic manuscript.

To this first edition is prefixed a dedication, written by the bookseller in the most contorted style, which has given rise to theories and conjectures without number. It runs as follows:--

TO . THE . ONLIE . BEGETTER . OF THESE . INSVING . SONNETS . MR . W . H . ALL . HAPPINESSE . AND . THAT . ETERNITIE . PROMISED . BY . OVR . EVER-LIVING . POET . WISHETH . THE . WELL-WISHING . ADVENTVRER . IN . SETTING . FORTH . T . T .

The meaning of the signature is clear enough, since "A booke called Shakespeare's Sonnets" was entered in the Stationers' Register on May 20, 1609, under the name of Thomas Thorpe. On the other hand, throughout this century and the last, there has been no end to the discussion as to what is meant by "onlie begetter" (only producer, or only procurer, or only inspirer?); and numberless have been the attempts to identify the "Mr. W. H." who is so designated. While the far-fetched expression "begetter" has been subjected to equally far-fetched interpretations, the most impossible guesses have been hazarded as to the initials W. H., and the most incredible conjectures put forward as to the person to whom the Sonnets are addressed.

Strange as it may seem, it is nevertheless the fact, that during the first eighty years of the eighteenth century the Sonnets were taken as being all addressed to one woman, all written in honour of Shakespeare's mistress. It was not till 1780 that Malone and his friends declared that more than one hundred of the poems were addressed to a man. This view of the matter, however, did not even then command general assent, and so late as 1797 Chalmers seriously maintained that all the Sonnets were addressed to Queen Elizabeth, who was also, he believed, the inspirer of Spenser's famous _Amoretti_, in reality addressed to the lady who afterwards became his wife. Not until the beginning of this century did people in general understand, what Shakespeare's contemporaries can certainly never have doubted, that the first hundred and twenty-six Sonnets are directed to a young man.

It now followed almost of necessity that this young man should be identified with the "Mr. W. H." who is described as the "onlie begetter" of the poems. The second group, indeed, is addressed to a woman; but the first group is much the larger, and follows immediately upon the dedication.

Some have taken the word "begetter" to signify the man who procured the manuscript for the bookseller, and have conjectured that the initials are those of William Hathaway, a brother-in-law of Shakespeare's (Neil, Elze). Dr. Farmer last century advanced the claims of William Hart, the poet's nephew, who, as was afterwards discovered, was not born until 1600. The mere fact that, by a whim or oversight of which there are many other examples in the first edition, the word "hues," in Sonnet xx., is printed in italics with a capital and spelt _Hews_, led Tyrwhitt to assume the existence of an otherwise unknown Mr. William Hughes, to whom he supposed the Sonnets to have been addressed. People have even been found to maintain that "Mr. W. H." referred to Shakespeare himself, some taking the "H." to be a mere misprint for "S.," others holding that the initials meant "Mr. William Himself" (Barnstorff).

Serious and competent critics for a long time inclined to the opinion that the "W. H." was a transposition of "H. W.," and represented none other than Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, whose close relation to the poet had long been known, and to whom his two narrative poems had been dedicated. This theory was held by Drake and Gervinus. But so early as 1832, Boaden advanced some objections to this view. He urged that Southampton never possessed the personal beauty incessantly dwelt upon in these poems. Finally, the Sonnets fit neither his age, nor his character, nor his history, full of movement, activity, and adverse fortune, to which no smallest allusion appears.

There is not the slightest doubt that these poems are addressed to a patron of rank; but our knowledge of the history of Shakespeare is so inconsiderable, that with regard to his patrons at the court, we have nothing to judge from but the dedications of Venus and of Lucrece to Southampton, and the dedication of the First Folio to Lords Pembroke and Montgomery, in which reference is made to the favour they had always shown these plays and their author, while he was alive. Bright and Boaden had already, in 1819 and 1832 respectively, advanced the opinion that Pembroke was the hero of the Sonnets. This view was shared by almost every one (Charles Armitage, Brown Hallan, Massey, Henry Brown, Minto, W. M. Rossetti), and towards the end of the nineteenth century this opinion could be considered as having established itself, since it was concurred in by the chief Shakespeare students (Dowden), and seemed to have obtained its final confirmation in the penetrating criticisms of Thomas Tyler (1890). All the above-mentioned authors agree about the fact, that there is only one person whose age, history, appearance, virtues, and vices accord in every respect with those of the young man to whom the Sonnets are addressed, just as his initials agree with those of the "Mr. W. H." to whom they are dedicated, and that is the young William Herbert, who in 1601 became Earl of Pembroke. Born on April 8, 1580, he came to London in the autumn of 1597 or spring of 1598, and very soon, in all probability, made the acquaintance of Shakespeare, whose patron, as the first folio edition of the dramas prove, he remained until the poet's death.

The way by which we arrive at William Herbert is this: The Sonnets cxxxv. and cxxxvi. as well as cxliii. contain plays on the word _will_, and the name _Will_, obscure as they are, they show that the friend whom the Sonnets glorify had the same Christian name as Shakespeare. This was true of Pembroke, but not of Southampton, whose Christian name was Henry. Shakespeare's Sonnets are not isolated poems. Though we are not certain whether the order of the Sonnets in the original edition is the sequence chosen by the poet himself, still it is evident that they stand in an intimate relation to each other, a thought or motive suggested in one being developed more at length in the next or one of the subsequent Sonnets. The grouping does not seem to be arbitrary; at any rate, it is so far careful that all attempts to alter it have only rendered the poems more obscure. The first seventeen Sonnets, for example, form a closely interwoven group; in all of them, the friend is exhorted not to die unmarried, but to leave the world an heir to his beauty, which must otherwise fade and perish with him. Sonnets c.-cxxvi., which are inseparably connected, turn on the reunion of two friends after a coldness or misunderstanding has for a time severed them. Finally, Sonnets cxxvii.-clii. are all addressed, not to a friend, but to a mistress, the Dark Lady whose relation to the two friends has already formed the subject of earlier Sonnets.

Sonnet cxliv.--one of the most interesting, inasmuch it depicts in straightforward terms the poet's situation between friend and mistress--had already appeared, as above mentioned, in _The Passionate Pilgrim_ (1599). It characterises the friend as the poet's "better angel," the mistress as his "worser spirit," and expresses the painful suspicion that the friend is entangled in the Dark Lady's toils--

"I guess one angel in another's hell;"

so that both at once are lost to him, he through her and she through him.

But precisely the same theme is treated in Sonnet xl., which turns on the fact that the friend has robbed Shakespeare of his "love." These two Sonnets must thus be of the same date; and from Sonnet xxxiii., which relates to the same circumstances, we see that the friendship had existed only a very short time when it was overshadowed by the intrigue between the friend and the mistress:--

"But out, alack! he was but one hour mine."

At what time, then, did the friendship begin? The date may be determined with some confidence, even apart from the question as to who the friend was. We know that Shakespeare must have written sonnets before 1598, since Meres published in that year his often-quoted words about the "sugred Sonnets"; but we cannot possibly determine which Sonnets these were, or whether we possess them at all, since those which passed from hand to hand "among his private friends" may very possibly have disappeared. If they are included in our collection, we may take them to be those in which we find frequent parallels to lines in _Venus and Adonis_ and the early plays, though these coincidences are by no means sufficient, as some of the German critics[1] would have us believe, finally to establish the date of the Sonnets in which they occur. However, they vary greatly in quality, and may have been written at different periods. The first group, with its reiterated appeal (seventeen times repeated) to the friend, to leave the world a living copy of his beauty, is unquestionably the least valuable. The personal feelings of the poet do not come much into play here, and though these poems may have been addressed to William Herbert in 1598, it is not impossible, taking into account the many analogies in thought and mode of expression to be found in them and in _Venus and Adonis_ and _Romeo and Juliet_, that they were produced several years before, and in this case, addressed to Southampton. Thomas Tyler believed he had satisfactorily established the date of one important group by showing that a passage in Meres's book had influenced the conception and expression of one of Shakespeare's Sonnets. It cannot reasonably be doubted that Shakespeare saw _Palladis Tamia_; the author perhaps sent him a copy; and in any case he could not but have read with interest the warm and sincere commendation there bestowed upon himself. Now there occurs in Meres's book a passage in which, after quoting Ovid's

"Jamque opus exegi, quod nec Jovis ira, nec ignis, Nec poterit ferrum, nec edax abolere vetustas,"

and Horace's

"Exegi momentum aere perennius,"

the critic goes on to apply these words to his contemporaries Sir Philip Sidney, Spenser, Daniel, Drayton, Shakespeare, and Warner, and then winds up with a Latin eulogy of the same writers, composed by himself, partly in prose and partly in verse. But on reading attentively Shakespeare's Sonnet lv., whose resemblance to the well-known lines of Horace must have struck every reader, we find several expressions from this passage in _Palladis Tamia_, and even from the lines written by Meres himself, reappearing in it. The Sonnet must thus have been written at earliest in the end of 1598--Meres's book was entered in the Stationers' Register in September--and possibly not till the beginning of 1599. Since, then, the following Sonnet (lvi.), which must date from about the same time, speaks of the friendship as newly formed--

"Let this sad interim like the ocean be Which parts the shores, where _two contracted new_ Come daily to the banks"--

we may confidently assign to the year 1598 the first contract of amity between the poet and his friend. However, all this is by no means conclusive. Shakespeare may have known Horace from other sources than Meres, and the quotation from Ovid, together with the expressions used by Meres, he certainly had encountered in Golding's translation of the _Metamorphoses_, with which he was familiar.

The historical allusions in Sonnets c.-cxxvi., which form a continuous poem, are not, indeed, by any means clear or easy to interpret; but Sonnet civ. dates the whole group definitely enough, in the statement that three years have elapsed since the first meeting of the friends:--

"Three winters cold Have from the forests shook three summers' pride; Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turn'd In process of the seasons have I seen; Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burn'd, Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green."

Thus we must assign this important group to the year 1601; and this being so, it must also appear probable that the line--

"The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured "--

alludes to the fact that Elizabeth (for whom, in the mode of the day, the moon was the accepted symbol) had come unharmed through the dangers of Essex's rebellion--the more so as the beautiful lines--

"Now with the drops of this most balmy time My love looks fresh "--

show that the poem was written in the spring. It would be unreasonable to infer from this allusion any ill-will on the poet's part towards Essex and his comrades. Still less can we follow Tyler, when, by the aid of a complex scaffolding of hypotheses built up, in German rather than in English fashion, around Sonnets cxxiv. and cxxv., he laboriously works up to the air-drawn conjecture that Shakespeare is here expressing himself offensively towards his former patron Southampton, now a prisoner in the Tower, and even that Southampton is aimed at in the line about those "who have lived for crime." Equally baseless, of course, is the corollary which would find in Sonnet cxxv. Shakespeare's defence against an accusation of faithlessness towards the man to whom he had written, seven years earlier, in the dedication of _Lucrece_, "The love I dedicate Your Lordship is without end." Nor It is absurd to construct a whole repulsive and fantastic romance on the basis of a single obscure phrase.

Turning now from the poems to the person to whom they are believed to have been addressed, this is what we learn of him:--

William Herbert, son of Henry Herbert and his third wife, the celebrated Mary Sidney, had for his tutor as a boy the poet Samuel Daniel; entered at Oxford in 1593, where he remained for two years; received permission in April 1597, when he was seventeen years old, to live in London, but, as we gather from letters of the period, does not seem to have come up to town until the spring of 1598.

In August 1597, negotiations were conducted by letter between his parents and Lord Burghley with a view to his marriage with Burghley's grand-daughter Bridget Vere, a daughter of the Earl of Oxford. It is true that she was only thirteen, but William Herbert was quite prepared to enter upon the engagement. He was to travel abroad before the marriage. Although his mother, the Countess of Pembroke, perhaps divining her son's too in flammable nature, and therefore wanting to see him married betimes, was much in favour of this project, and although the Earl of Oxford was pleased with the young man and praised his "many good partes," difficulties arose of which we have no record, and the plan came to nothing.

In London, young Herbert lived at Baynard's Castle, close to the Blackfriars Theatre, and may thus have been brought in contact with the players. It is more probable, however, that so brilliant a woman as "Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother," should have aroused his interest in Shakespeare; and in that case the poet, in all probability, made the acquaintance of this distinguished and discerning patroness of art and artists as early as 1598. Herbert's father, who died soon afterwards, was already an invalid.

It appears that in August 1599 Herbert "followed the camp" at the annual musters, attending her Majesty with two hundred horse, and "swaggering it among the men of war."

He is from the first described as a bad courtier. Rowland Whyte writes of him at this time: "He was much blamed for his cold and weeke Maner of pursuing her Majesties favour, having had soe good steps to lead him unto it. There is want of Spirit and Courage laid to his charge, and that he is a melancholy young man." We may gather from this what fiery devotion every handsome and well-born young man was expected to pay to the elderly Queen. Soon after, however, it appears from a letter from his father to Elizabeth that she must have expressed herself highly satisfied with the young man, and we also learn that he was "exceedingly beloued at Court of all Men." He appears to have been very handsome, and to have possessed all the fascination which so often belongs to an amiable _mauvais sujet_. Clarendon says of him, in the first book of his _History of the Rebellion_, that "he was immoderately given up to women," and that "he indulged himself in pleasures of all kind, almost in all excesses." Clarendon remarks, however, what is of

## particular interest for us, that the young Pembroke possessed a good

deal of self-control: "He retained such a power and jurisdiction over his very appetite, that he was not so much transported with beauty and outward allurements as with those advantages of the mind as manifested an extraordinary wit, and spirit, and knowledge, and administered great pleasure in the conversation. To these he sacrificed himself, his precious time, and much of his fortune."

In November 1599, Herbert had an hour's private audience with Elizabeth. Whyte, who relates this, remarks that he now stands high in the Queen's favour, "but he greatly wants advise." He passed the rest of the winter in the country, suffering from an illness which seems to have taken the form of ague, with incessant headaches.

Tyler is inclined, not without reason, to assign Sonnets xc.-xcvi. to this period. Shakespeare's complaints of his friend's "desertion" may refer to his life at Court; the expressions in Sonnet xci. as to horses, hawks, and hounds, perhaps point to the young man's absorption in sport. The following Sonnets dwell unequivocally upon discreditable rumours as to the friend's life and conduct. Here appears the above-quoted (p. 172) line:--

"Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds."

Here occurs the couplet:--

"How like Eve's apple doth thy beauty grow, If thy sweet virtue answer not thy show!"

And, in spite of all the loving forbearance which the poet manifests towards his friend, he seems to imply that the ugly rumours were not unfounded:--

"How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame, Which, like a canker in the fragrant rose, Doth spot the beauty of thy budding name! O, in what sweets dost thou thy sins enclose! That tongue that tells the story of thy days, (Making lascivious comments on thy sport,) Cannot dispraise but in a kind of praise; Naming thy name blesses an ill report.

There was an improvement in the health of Herbert's father during the year 1600, yet Lord and Lady Pembroke were absent from London all summer, remaining at their country seat, Wilton. In the month of May, Herbert, accompanied by Sir Charles Danvers, went to Gravesend to pay his respects to Lady Rich and Lady Southampton. This visit proves clearly that there was not, as Tyler's above-mentioned interpretation of certain Sonnets would lead us to assume, any coolness between Herbert and the houses of Essex and Southampton. It is also worth noting that his companion on this excursion was so intimately associated with the chiefs of the malcontent party, that in the following year he had to pay with his life for his share in the rebellion.

In the accounts of a splendid and very much talked-of wedding, between a Lord Herbert and one of the Queen's ladies, which took place at Blackfriars in June 1600, we for the first time come upon William Herbert's name in company with that of the lady who seems to be the heroine of Shakespeare's Sonnets. The bride, Mrs. Ann Russell, was conducted to church by William Herbert and Lord Cobham. After supper there was a masque, in which eight splendidly dressed ladies executed a new and unusual dance. Among these are mentioned Mrs. Fitton, and two of the ladies-in-waiting whose names had shortly before been coupled with that of Essex (Mrs. Southwell and Mrs. Bess Russell). Each had "a skirt of Cloth of Siluer, a Mantell of Carnacion Taffete cast vnder the Arme, and their Haire loose about their Shoulders, curiously knotted and interlaced." The leader of this double quadrille was Mrs. Fitton. She approached the Queen and "woed her to dawnce; her Majestie asked what she was; '_Affection_,' she said. '_Affection!_' said the Queen, '_affection_ is false.' Yet her Majestie rose and dawnced."

Later in the year Whyte remarks in his letters that Herbert shows no "disposition to marry"; and we find him in September and October 1600 vigorously training at Greenwich for a Court tournament.

On January 19, 1601, his father's death made William Herbert Earl of Pembroke. Very soon afterwards (the matter is mentioned in a letter from Robert Cecil so early as February 5) he got into deep disgrace over a love affair--evidently that which forms the subject of Shakespeare's Sonnets. He had for some time carried on a secret intrigue with the aforesaid Mary Fitton, a maid-of-honour who stood high in the Queen's good graces; and the secret now came to light. "Mistress Fitton," writes Cecil, "is proved with child, and the Earl of Pembroke, being examined, confesseth a fact, but utterly renounceth all marriage. I fear they will both dwell in the Tower awhile, for the Queen hath vowed to send them thither." In another contemporary letter it is stated that "in that tyme when that Mres Fytton was in great fauor ... and duringe the time yt the Earle of Pembrooke fauord her, she would put off her head tire and tucke vp her clothes and take a large white cloake, and march as though she had bene a man to meete the said Earle out of the Courte."

Mary Fitton gave birth to a still-born son; Pembroke lay for a month in the Fleet Prison, and was banished from Court. He shortly afterwards applied through Cecil for leave to travel abroad. The Queen's displeasure, he says, is "a hell" to him; he hopes the Queen will not carry her resentment so far as to bind him to the country which has now become "hateful to him of all others." The permission to travel seems to have been given and then revoked. In the middle of June he writes that imploring letter to Cecil in which the reference to "her whose Incomparable beauty was the onely sonne of my little world," was designed to touch Elizabeth's hard heart; for Pembroke, it is plain, had now realised that what had offended her Majesty was not so much his intrigue with Mary Fitton as the fact of his having overlooked her own much higher perfections. But the compliments came too late. Elizabeth, as we have already seen in the case of Essex, knew how to make the objects of her resentment suffer in that most sensitive point--the pocket. The "patent of the Forest of Dean," which had been held by the late Lord Pembroke, expired with him, and the son expected, according to use and wont, to have it renewed in his favour; but it was assigned to Pembroke's rival, Sir Edward Winter, and not until seven years later, under James, did Pembroke recover it.

Pembroke continued in disgrace, his renewed applications for permission to travel were persistently refused, and he was ordered to regard himself as banished from Court, and to "keep house in the country." It is this overshadowing of Pembroke's fortunes in 1601 which explains the temporary breaking-off of his relations with Shakespeare in London, indicated by the "Envoy" with which Sonnet cxxvi. ends the series addressed to the Friend.

The close and affectionate relation between them was no doubt revived under James. This appears clearly enough from the Dedication of the First Folio. Let us now cast a rapid glance over the remainder of Pembroke's career.

His father's death placed him in possession of a large fortune, but the irregularity of his life left him seldom free from money embarrassments. In 1604 he married Lady Mary, the seventh daughter of Lord Talbot, and the marriage was celebrated with a tournament. His wife brought him a large property, but it was thought at the time that he paid very dear for it in having to take her into the bargain. The marriage was far from happy.

Pembroke shared the love of literature which had distinguished his mother and his uncle, Sir Philip Sidney. According to Aubrey, he was "the greatest Mæcenas to learned men of any peer of his time or since." Among his "learned" friends were the poets Donne, and Daniel, and Massinger, who was the son of his father's steward. Ben Jonson composed a eulogistic epigram in his honour, as well he might, for every New Year Pembroke sent Ben £20 to buy books with. Inigo Jones is said to have visited Italy at his expense, and was frequently employed by him. Davison's _Poetical Rhapsody_ and numerous other books are dedicated to him. Chapman, who was among his intimates, inscribed a sonnet to him at the close of his translation of the _Iliad_. This fact is of particular interest to us, because Chapman (as Professor Minto succeeded in establishing) is clearly the rival poet who paid court to Pembroke, won his goodwill and admiration, and thereby aroused jealousy and melancholy self-criticism in Shakespeare's breast, as we read in Sonnets lxxviii.-lxxxvi.[2].

It is especially on Sonnet lxxxvi. that Minto bases his identification of the rival poet with Chapman. The very opening line, referring to the "proud full sail of his great verse," suggests at once the fourteen-syllable measure in which Chapman translated the _Iliad_. Chapman was full of a passionate enthusiasm for the art of poetry, which he lost no opportunity of glorifying; and he laid claim to supernatural inspiration. In the Dedication to his poem _The Shadow of the Night_ (1594), he speaks with severe contempt of the presumption of those who "think Skill so mightily pierced with their loves that she should prostitutely show them her secrets, when she will scarcely be looked upon by others but with invocation, fasting, watching--yea, not without having drops of their souls, _like a heavenly familiar. _Hence Shakespeare's lines--

"Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to writ Above a mortal pitch that struck me dead?"

and the expression--

"He, nor that affable familiar ghost Which nightly gulls him with intelligence."

After the accession of James, Pembroke immediately took a high position at the new Court. Before the year 1603 was out, he was a Knight of the Garter, and had entertained the King at Wilton. He rose from one high post to another, until in 1615 he became Lord Chamberlain; but he continued to the last the dissipated life of his youth. He devoted large sums of money to the exploration and colonisation of America. Places were named after him in the Bermudas and Virginia. In 1614, morever, he became a member of the East India Company.

He opposed the Spanish Alliance, and was no friend to the King's foreign policy. He is thought to have instigated in some measure the attack on the Mexico fleet for which Raleigh paid so dear. He was an opponent of Bacon as Lord Chancellor, and in 1621 advocated an inquiry into the charges of corruption which were brought against him; but afterwards, like Southampton, displayed great moderation, and spoke strongly against the proposal to deprive Bacon of his peerage.

He stood by the King's deathbed in March 1625, had a serious illness in 1626, and died in April 1630 "of an apoplexy after a full and cheerful supper." Donne in 1660 published some poems.

[1] Hermann Conrad in _Preussische Jahrbücher_, February 1895. Under the pseudonym of Hermann Isaac in _Jahrbuch der Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft_, vol. xix. p. 176.

[2] I do not find that Mr. G. A. Leigh has succeeded in identifying the rival poet with Tasso (_Westminster Review_, February 1897).

VI

_THE "DARK LADY" OF THE SONNETS--MARY FITTON_

In speaking of _Love's Labours Lost_, I remarked that it was not difficult to distinguish the original text of the comedy from the portions added and altered during the revision of 1598; and I cited (p. 38) several instances in which the distinction was clear. Especial emphasis was laid on the fact that Biron's (or, as the context shows, Biron-Shakespeare's) rapturous panegyrics of love in the fourth act belong to the later date.

At another place (p. 83) it was pointed out that the two Rosalines of _Love's Labour's Lost_ (end of the third act) and of _Romeo and Juliet_ (ii. 4) were in all probability drawn from the same model, since she is in both places described as a blonde with black eyes. In the original text of _Love's Labour's Lost_ (Act iii.) she is expressly called--

"A whitely wanton with a velvet brow, With two pitch balls stuck in her face for eyes."

All the more surprising must it seem that during the revision the poet quite obviously had before his eyes another model, repeatedly described as "black," whose dark complexion indeed, so uncommon and un-English that it was apt to be thought ugly, is insisted upon as strongly as that of the "Dark Lady" in the Sonnets. Immediately before Biron bursts forth into his great hymn to Eros, in which Shakespeare so clearly makes him his mouthpiece, the King banters him as to the murky hue of the object of his adoration:--

"_King_. By heaven, thy love is black as ebony. _Biron_. Is ebony like her? O wood divine! A wife of such wood were felicity. O! who can give an oath? where is a book? That I may swear beauty doth beauty lack, If that she learn not of her eye to look: No face is fair, that is not full so black. _King_. O paradox! Black is the badge of hell, The hue of dungeons, and the scowl of night; And beauty's crest becomes the heavens well."

Biron's answer to this is highly remarkable; for it is exactly what Shakespeare himself says, in Sonnet cxxvii., to the advantage of his dark beauty:--

"_Biron_. Devils soonest tempt, resembling spirits of light. O! if in black my lady's brows be deck'd, It mourns, that painting, and usurping hair, Should ravish doters with a false aspect; And therefore is she born to make black fair. Her favour turns the fashion of the days; For native blood is counted painting now, And therefore red, that would avoid dispraise, Paints itself black, to imitate her brow."

The Sonnet runs thus:--

"In the old age black was not counted fair, Or if it were, it bore not beauty's name; But now is black beauty's successive heir, And beauty slander'd with a bastard shame; For since each hand hath put on nature's power, Fairing the foul with art's false borrow'd face, Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bower, But is profan'd, if not lives in disgrace. Therefore my mistress' eyes are raven black, Her eyes so suited, and they mourners seem At such, who, not born fair, no beauty lack, Slandering creation with a false esteem: Yet so they mourn, becoming of their woe, That every tongue says, beauty should look so."

It appears, then, that the dark beauty in _Love's Labour's Lost_ must also have had a living model; and when we observe that the revision, as the title-page tells us, took place when the comedy was to be presented before her Highness at Christmas 1597, and further, that the dark Rosaline in the play is maid-of-honour to a princess who is called, in words strongly suggesting a passing compliment to the Queen, "a gracious moon"--we can scarcely avoid the conclusion that the beautiful brunette must have been one of the Queen's ladies, and that the whole end of the fourth act was addressed to her over the heads of the uninitiated spectators. Who she was, moreover, we can now conjecture with tolerable security. We know quite well which of the Queen's ladies brought Pembroke into disgrace, and we are no less certain that the lady who enthralled Pembroke was the black-eyed brunette whom Shakespeare, in his own words, loved to "distraction" and to "madding fever."

On the monument of Mary Fitton's mother in Gawsworth Church, in Cheshire, a highly coloured bust of Mary Fitton herself[1] led Tyler to assert that she must have been a marked brunette. It is true that the bust cannot give us a very accurate idea of her appearance in the year 1600, since it was executed in 1626, when she was forty-eight; but the complexion is dark, the high-piled hair and the large eyes black. That it does not suggest a beautiful original is a point in favour of its identity with the Dark Lady as described in Sonnet cxli.:--

"In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes, For they in thee a thousand errors note; But 'tis my heart that loves what they despise, Who in despite of view is pleas'd to dote. Nor are mine ears with thy tongue's tune delighted; Nor tender feeling to base touches prone, Nor taste, nor smell, desire to be invited To any sensual feast with thee alone: But my five wits nor my five senses can Dissuade one foolish heart from serving thee, Who leaves unsway'd the likeness of a man, Thy proud heart's slave and vassal wretch to be: Only my plague thus far I count my gain, That she that makes me sin awards me pain."

The Rev. W. A. Harrison has discovered a family tree from which it appears that Mary Fitton, born June 24, 1578, became a maid-of-honour to Elizabeth in 1595, at the age of seventeen. Thus she was nineteen years old when, at the Court festivities of 1597, Shakespeare's company acted _Love's Labour's Lost_, with the panegyric of the dark beauty, Rosaline. She must have made the acquaintance of the poet and player, then thirty-three years old, at earlier Court entertainments. Who can doubt that it was she, with her high position and daring spirit, who made the first advances?

That the Dark Lady did not live with Shakespeare appears clearly enough in the Sonnets--for instance, in Sonnet cxliv. ("but being both from me"). It may be gathered from Sonnet cli., with the expressions "triumphant prize," "proud of this pride," that she was greatly his superior in rank and station, so that her conquest for some time filled him with a sense of triumph. Tyler even believes that there is an actual allusion to her name in Sonnet cli., which, as a whole, abounds in such daring equivoques as would be impossible in modern poetry.

It was thought surprising that in Sonnet clii., in which Shakespeare calls himself forsworn because he loves his lady although married to another, he also states expressly that she too is married, calling her "twice forsworn," since she has not only broken her "bed-vow," but broken her "new faith" to Shakespeare himself. It seemed difficult to reconcile this with the fact that Mrs. Fitton ("Mistress" in those days being applicable to unmarried no less than to married women) was always called by her father's name. She was married in 1607 to a certain William Polwheele, with whom she appears to have had a love-intrigue before the wedding. After the death of her husband she was married a second time to John Lougher.

However, it must now be pointed out that a work, published in 1897, which for the first time gave a trustworthy account of Mary Fitton's life, has rendered it excessively improbable that she should be identical with the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. The title of the work is: _Gossip from a Muniment-Room, being Passages in the lives of Anne and Mary Fitton_, 1574-1618; it is published by Lady Newdigate-Newdegate, who is married to a descendant of the elder sister, Anne Fitton, and it contains many interesting letters to this lady, with other communications from the family-archives. Here it is proved--in spite of Tyler's attempted contradiction--that the two well-preserved portraits of Mary Fitton at Arbury show that she was not dark at all, but had a light complexion, brown hair, and grey eyes.

From Mary Fitton herself there is only a brief note contained in the collection, but her name is often mentioned in the letters. They prove, that at the beginning of her career as maid-of-honour to the Queen, she had an admirer in the elderly court-functionary, Sir William Knollys, inspector of the household, who later, under King James, became a very potent personality as Lord Knollys; and it was evidently arranged between them that they would marry as soon as Sir William should become a widower. Their relations were not severed until the Pembroke scandal came out. Sir William married another lady after the death of his wife. This relation appeared to support the belief that Mary Fitton was Shakespeare's lady, as far as it gave a clue to the expression _thy bed vow broke_, and in so far as Knollys' Christian name William seemed to explain the two first lines in Sonnet cxxxv.: You have your will (or William) and William (or will) a second time and William (or will) into the bargain. It had long been admitted that the two last of these _Wills_ referred to Pembroke and Shakespeare. And it was suggested that a third Will was hidden in the first. In 1881 Dowden wrote: "As we know that the lady had a husband, it may be possible that he too bore the name of William." As against the unmistakable evidence of the portraits, however, it is impossible to attribute any weight to this circumstance. Moreover, the name of Shakespeare is never mentioned in the recently-published papers of the Fitton family. Of course the silence in itself is not conclusive. Mary Fitton may have known Shakespeare intimately without her relatives being aware of the fact. Besides, we know, from the dedication, which the clown of the Shakespearian troupe, the well known William Kemp, in 1600, addressed to her in his little book "Nine Daies Wonder," that she had certain relations with the company. This dedication runs as follows: _Mistress Anne (supposed to be Mary) Fitton, Mayde of Honour of the most sacred Mayde Royal Queene Elisabeth._ But I confess, that Mary's grey eyes decide the matter for me.

However, even if it be unreasonable to identify Mary Fitton with the Dark Lady of the Sonnets, after the publication of the Fitton family papers, this does not exclude the possibility that Pembroke may have been Shakespeare's rival. If Essex, as above mentioned, was obliged to acknowledge that he had had intrigues with four of the ladies of the court at the same time, Pembroke may well have had intimate relations with two of them at Once.

The Dark Lady must have been a woman in the extremest sense of the word, a daughter of Eve, alluring, ensnaring, greedy of conquest, mendacious and faithless, born to deal out rapture and torment with both hands, the very woman to set in vibration every chord in a poet's soul.

There can be no reasonable doubt that in the early days of his relation with the well-born mistress, Shakespeare felt himself a favourite of fortune, intoxicated with love and happiness, exalted above his station, honoured and enriched. She must at first have been to him what Maria Fiammetta, the natural daughter of a king, was to Boccaccio. She must have brought a breath from a higher world, an aroma of aristocratic womanhood, into his life. He must have admired her wit, her presence of mind and her daring, her capricious fancy and her quickness of retort. He must have studied, enjoyed, and adored in her--and that in the closest intimacy--the well-bred ease, the sportive coquetry, the security, elegance, and gaiety of the emancipated lady. Who can tell how much of her personality has been transferred to his brilliant young Beatrices and Rosalinds?

First and foremost he must have owed to her the rapture of feeling his vitality intensified--a main element in the happiness which, in the first years of their communion, finds expression in the sparkling love-comedies we have just reviewed. Let it not be objected that the Sonnets do not dwell upon this happiness. The Sonnets date from the period of storm and stress, when he had ascertained what at first, no doubt, he had but vaguely suspected, that his mistress had ensnared his friend; and in composing them he no doubt antedated many of the passionate and distracted unoods which overwhelmed him at the crisis, when he not only realised the fact of their intrigue, but saw it dragged to the light of day. He then felt as though, doubly betrayed, he had irrevocably lost them both. Thus the picture of his mistress drawn in the Sonnets shows her, not as she appeared to him in earlier years, but as he saw her during this later period.

Yet he also depicts moments, and even hours, when his whole nature must have been lapped in tenderness and harmony. The scene, for instance, so melodiously portrayed in Sonnet cxxviii. is steeped in an atmosphere of happy love--the scene in which, seated at the virginals, the lady, whom the poet addresses as "my music," lets her delicate aristocratic fingers wander over the keys, enchanting with their concord the listener who longs to press her fingers and her lips to his. He envies the keys that "kiss the tender inward of her hand," and concludes:--

"Since saucy jacks so happy are in this, Give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss."

It is only natural, however, that the morbidly passionate, complaining, and accusing Sonnets should be in the majority.

Again and again he reverts to her faithlessness and laxity of conduct. In Sonnet cxxxvii. he speaks of his love as "anchored in the bay where all men ride." Sonnet cxxxviii. begins:--

"When my love swears that she is made of truth, I do believe her, though I know she lies."

And in Sonnet clii. he reproaches himself with having sworn a host of false oaths in swearing to her good qualities:--

"But why of two oaths' breach do I accuse thee, When I break twenty? I am perjur'd most; For all my vows are oaths but to misuse thee, And all my honest faith in thee is lost: For I have sworn deep oaths of thy deep kindness, Oaths of thy love, thy truth, thy constancy; And, to enlighten thee, gave eyes to blindness, Or made them swear against the thing they see."

In Sonnet cxxxix. he depicts her as carrying her thirst for admiration to such a pitch of wantonness that even in his presence she could not refrain from coquetting on every hand:--

"Tell me thou lov'st elsewhere; but in my sight, Dear heart, forbear to glance thine eye aside: What need'st thou wound with cunning, when thy might Is more than my o'erpress'd defence can 'bide?"

She cruelly abuses her witchery over him. She is as tyrannical, he says in Sonnet cxxxi., "as those whose beauties proudly make them cruel," well-knowing that to his "dear-doting heart" she is "the finest and most precious jewel." There is actual magic in the power she exerts over him. He does not understand it himself, and exclaims in Sonnet cl.:--

"Whence hast thou this becoming of things ill, That in the very refuse of thy deeds There is such strength and warrantise of skill, That in my mind thy worst all best exceeds?"

No French poet of the eighteen-thirties, not even Musset himself self, has given more passionate utterance than Shakespeare to the fever and agony and distraction of love. See, for instance, Sonnet cxlvii.:--

"My love is as a fever, longing still For that which longer nurseth the disease: Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill, The uncertain-sickly appetite to please. My reason, the physician to my love, Angry that his prescriptions are not kept, Hath left me, and I desperate now approve Desire is death, which physic did except. Past cure I am, now reason is past care, And frantic-mad with evermore unrest: My thoughts and my discourse as madmen's are, At random from the truth vainly express'd; For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright, Who art as black as hell, as dark as night."

He depicts himself as a lover frenzied with passion. His eyes are dimmed with vigils and with tears. He no longer understands either himself or the world: "If that is fair whereon his false eyes dote, What means the world to say it is not so?" If it is not fair, then his love proves that a lover's eye is less trustworthy than that of the indifferent world (Sonnet cxlviii.).

And yet he well knows the seat of the witchery by which she holds him in thrall. It lies in the glow and expression of her exquisite "raven black" eyes (Sonnets cxxvii. and cxxxix.). He loves her soulful eyes, which, knowing the torments her disdain inflicts upon him--

"Have put on black, and loving mourners be, Looking with pretty ruth upon my pain." --Sonnet cxxxii.

Young as she is, her nature is all compounded of passion and will; she is ungovernable in her caprices, born for conquest and for self-surrender.

While we can guess that towards Shakespeare she made the first advances, we know that she did so in the case of his friend. In more than one sonnet she is expressly spoken of as "wooing him."[2] In Sonnet cxliii. Shakespeare uses an image which, in all its homeliness, is exceedingly graphic:--

"Lo! as a careful housewife runs to catch One of her feather'd creatures broke away, Sets down her babe, and makes all swift dispatch In pursuit of the thing she would have stay; Whilst her neglected child holds her in chase, Cries to catch her whose busy care is bent To follow that which flies before her face, Not prizing her poor infant's discontent: So runn'st thou after that which flies from thee, Whilst I, thy babe, chase thee afar behind; But if thou catch thy hope, turn back to me, And play the mother's part, kiss me, be kind: So will I pray that thou may'st have thy _Will_, If thou turn back, and my loud crying still."

The tenderness of feeling here apparent is characteristic of the poet's whole attitude of mind in this dual relation. Even when he cannot acquit his friend of all guilt, even when he mournfully upbraids him with having robbed the poor man of his one lamb, his chief concern is always lest any estrangement should arise between his friend and himself. See, for instance, the exquisitely melodious Sonnet xl.:--

"Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all: What hast thou then more than thou hadst before? No love, my love, that thou may'st true love call: All mine was thine before thou had'st this more. . . . . . . . . . I do forgive thy robbery, gentle thief, Although thou steal thee all my poverty."

The same tone of sentiment runs through the moving Sonnet xlii., which begins:--

"That thou hast her, it is not all my grief, And yet it may be said, I loved her dearly; That she hath thee, is of my wailing chief, A loss in love that touches me more nearly."

It closes with this somewhat vapid conceit:--

"But here's the joy: my friend and I are one; Sweet flattery! then she loves but me alone."

All these expressions, taken together, point not only to the enormous value which Shakespeare attached to the young Pembroke's friendship, but also to the sensual and spiritual attraction which, in spite of everything, his fickle mistress continued to possess for him.

It is not impossible that a passage in Ben Jonson's _Bartholomew Fair_ (1614) may contain a satirical allusion to the relation portrayed in the Sonnets (published in 1609). In act v. sc. 3 there is presented a puppet-show setting forth "The ancient modern history of Hero and Leander, otherwise called the Touchstone of true Love, with as true a trial of Friendship between Damon and Pythias, two faithful friends o' the Bankside." Hero is "a wench o' the Bankside," and Leander swims across the Thames to her. Damon and Pythias meet at her lodging, and abuse each other most violently when they find that they have but one love, only to finish up as the best friends in the world.[2]

[1] Reproduced in Tyler's _Shakespeare's Sonnets._

[2]

_"Damon_. Whore-master in thy face; Thou hast lain with her thyself, I'll prove it in this place. _"Leatherhead_. They are whore-masters both, sir, that's a plain case. _"Pythias_. Thou lie like a rogue. _"Leatherhead_. Do I lie like a rogue? _"Pythias_. A pimp and a scab. _"Leatherhead_. A pimp and a scab! I say, between you _you have both but one drab_. _"Pythias and Damon_. Come, now we'll go together to breakfast to Hero. _"Leatherhead._ Thus, gentles, you perceive without any denial 'Twixt Damon and Pythias here friendship's true trial."

VII

_PLATONISM--SHAKESPEARE'S AND MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS--THE TECHNIQUE OF THE SONNETS_

The fact that the person to whom Shakespeare's Sonnets are dedicated is simply entitled "Mr. W. H." long served to divert attention from William Herbert, as it was thought that it would have been an impossible impertinence thus to address, without his title, a nobleman like the Earl of Pembroke. To us it is clear that this form of address was adopted precisely in order that Pembroke might not be exhibited to the great public as the hero of the conflict darkly adumbrated in the Sonnets. They were not, indeed, written quite without an eye to publication, as is proved by the poet's promises that they are to immortalise the memory of his friend's beauty. But it was not Shakespeare himself who gave them to the press, and bookseller Thorpe must have known very well that Lord Pembroke would not care to see himself unequivocally designated as the lover of the Dark Lady and the poet's favoured rival, especially as that dramatic episode of his youth ended in a manner which it can scarcely have been pleasant to recall.

A weighty work, _A Life of Shakespeare_, published in the year 1898, by Mr. Sidney Lee, has, however, thoroughly shaken the theories of those who held Pembroke to be the person to whom the Sonnets were dedicated, and the youth who inspired so many of them. Mr. Lee, who--rather arbitrarily--declines to attach any importance to the mention of Pembroke's name, and the appeal to his relations with Shakespeare in the folio edition, takes it for granted that Southampton was the one literary patron to whom Shakespeare expressed his gratitude, and he concludes that he alone is the hero of the Sonnets. As Mr. Lee supposes that most of them were written between the spring of 1593 and the autumn of 1594, Southampton would have been young enough to be mentioned as in the poems. As to the dedication of the Sonnets, Sidney Lee declares that it would have been an impossible breach of decorum to designate a man of such high rank and importance as Pembroke was in the year 1609 as "Mr. W. H." In his youthful days, even before he had a right to the title, he was always called Lord Herbert. In 1616 Thorpe dedicated a book to him in these respectful, nay servile terms: To the right honourable William, Earle of Pembroke, Lord Chamberlaine to his Majestie, one of his most honorable Privie Counsell, and Knight of the Garter, etc.

Sidney Lee interprets the word _begetter_ as procurer merely, and thinks that Thorpe, in the dedication, simply meant to express his gratitude to a man who had procured one of the manuscripts of the Sonnets, then circulating, and had given it to him. And as a dedication of the poems of the Jesuit Robert Southwell (of 1606), was signed with the letters W. H., indicating another pirate-editor, William Hall, Sidney Lee concludes that it was the latter, who three years later had laid hold of the manuscript of the Sonnets for Thorpe, and that Thorpe had accordingly placed his enterprise under his patronage. In a domain where all is obscure it is difficult to uphold a definite opinion in the face of an opponent so much more learned than myself. Yet I cannot but feel that there is in the wording of the dedication something quite incompatible with the idea that Thorpe addresses himself to a friend and colleague, and Sidney Lee meets this objection only with the remark that Thorpe was notably careless in the use of language. Besides, it is suggestive, that in the three existing dedications by Thorpe, other than that to W. H., the first is addressed to Florio, the two others to the Earl of Pembroke, consequently to real protectors of rank, while the one, which he nine years before addressed to the editor, Edward Blount, who published the manuscript of Marlowe's translation of Lucan for him, is drawn up in a very different and much more intimate way. It is addressed to his "kind and true friend," and gives the friend in question a few hints "as to how to fit himself" for this unaccustomed part of patron. The distance from this to the dedication of the Sonnets is great.

What Sidney Lee attempts to prove by his researches and conjectures is, that the man, who figures in the Sonnets as the protector of the poet, was Southampton, and not Pembroke. The name of the youth is not of the first importance, nor does it signify greatly whether the woman celebrated and attacked in the Sonnets bore the name of Mary Fitton or another. However, the main point is, that in common with a number of previous authors, who have thoroughly studied the contemporaneous literature of Europe, and more especially the sonnet-poetry of Italy, France and England, such as Delius and Elze in Germany, and Henrik Schück in Sweden, Lee, relying on the numerous traits that these poems share with other sonnet-cycles of their period, stamps the whole argument of the text as fiction, and denies their autobiographical character. Scarcely any writer before him has so boldly endeavoured to limit Shakespeare's originality in the domain of sonnet-poetry.

In the first place Lee points out, that the whole body of sixteenth-century sonnets was so dependent firstly on Petrarch, then on such French writers as Ronsard, du Bellay and Desportes, that even the finest of them, the sonnets of Spenser, Sidney, Watson, Lodge, Drayton and Daniel may be characterised as imitative studies, if not simply as a mosaic of plagiarisms. Hereupon he tries to show Shakespeare's dependence on his predecessors. Shakespeare picked up, without scruple, ideas and expressions from the sonnets published by Daniel, Drayton, Watson, Barnabe Barnes, Constable and Sidney; he did this as deliberately and imperturbably as in his comedies he manipulated dramas and novels by contemporary and older poets. To Drayton especially is Shakespeare indebted. As all the Englishmen imitated the Frenchmen, Shakespeare has a false air of having been directly influenced by Ronsard, de Baif and Desportes, though he scarcely knew these poets in their own language.

The Danish translator of the Sonnets, Adolf Hansen, had already pointed out numerous impersonal traits. Some of the poorer Sonnets with their forced and complicated metaphors so obviously bear the impress of the spirit of the age, that it is quite impossible to regard them as characteristic of Shakespeare, and some few Sonnets are such complete imitations, that they cannot be accepted as confessions. Sonnets xviii. and xix. work out the same idea as Daniel's Delia, and Sonnets lv. and lxxxi. treat the very same subject as the sixty-ninth Sonnet in Spenser's _Amoretti_. Finally the story of the friends, one of whom deprives the other of his mistress, is to be found in Lyly's _Euphues_.

Sidney Lee maintains that when in Sonnets xxiv. and cxxii. Shakespeare propounds that the image of his friend is engraved in the depths of his heart, or that his brain is a better memorandum-book, as to the friend, than the book with which the latter has presented him, he is merely struggling with conceits of Ronsard's. When in Sonnets xliv, and xlv. he speaks about man as compounded of the elements, earth, air, fire and water, he appropriates motives from Spenser and Barnes. Sonnets xlvi. and xlvii., on the debate of the eye and the heart, are written in terms borrowed from the twentieth Sonnet in Watson's _Tears of Fancy_. Where he proclaims his assurance of the immortality of his verse, and the consequent eternity of his friend's fame, he does not speak from conviction, he only treats a motive, which, following the example of Pindar, Horace and Ovid, the Frenchmen Desportes and Ronsard, and after them such English sonneteers as Spenser, Drayton and Daniel had played upon. Not even when he writes that his lady is beautiful, though dark, and consequently unlovely, is he original; for Sidney had already used a similar phrase. And when he changes his mind, and in the dark eyes and dark complexion of his lady professes to read the blackness of her soul, he is even less original, for at that period the sonnet of invective was the standard variant of the sonnet of amorous eulogy. Nothing is more common than to find the sonneteer grossly abusing his mistress. Ronsard called his a tigress, a murderess, a Medusa; Barnabe Barnes describes his as a tyrant, a Gorgon, a rock; the transition from tenderness to reproach was so frequent, that it was even parodied by Gabriel Harvey. Following many other critics Sidney Lee finally points out that no weight can be attached to the fact, that in Sonnets xxii., lxii., lxxiii., and cxxxviii., Shakespeare speaks of himself as old, for this, too, was a standing conceit of the sonnet-poets of that time. Daniel in _Delia_ (23) when he was only twenty-nine speaks as if his life were finished. Richard Barnfield, only twenty years old, invites the boy Ganymedes to contemplate his silver hair, his wrinkled skin, the deep furrows of his face, all this in imitation of Petrarch.

Lee admits, however, that the group of Sonnets, most interesting to the reader, the most mature as to ideas and style, cannot be considered to date from the poet's thirtieth year; he even thinks that Shakespeare continued to write Sonnets until 1603, and propounds--regardless of the wording of the poem--that Sonnet cvii. was written in that year, on the occasion of the death of Queen Elizabeth. That the word "moon" here means Elizabeth is obvious. But that the expression

"The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured"

can mean the final eclipse of the moon is incredible. That the moon has passed through her eclipse, means, I take it, that she is shining brightly again, and thus the interpretation put forth above, of a hint at the frustrated conspiracy of Essex, is far more reasonable. But then this Sonnet, as well as those kindred to it in spirit and tone, point, not to the year 1603, but to 1601.

Yet here details are of minor importance. We take our stand on a fundamental conception of poetic production. All art, even that of the greater artists, begins with imitation; no poet avoids influences, and up to the present time no poet has hesitated to appropriate from predecessors all that might be of use to him. Even nowadays, when the appreciation of the duty of originality is so infinitely stronger than in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, it is easy to point out appropriations of foreign thoughts and turns of phrase among excellent poets, and it would be possible to enumerate a great variety of common traits among the lyrical poets of Europe. The range of subjects fit for lyrical poetry is not so very great, to be sure. As men, lyrists have after all many emotions and conditions in common. In the mode of expression alone--especially when ideas have to be expressed in an identical form of fourteen lines--is it possible for the poet to manifest his true originality.

No intelligent critic would think of looking to lyrical poems as to biographical sources, in the rough meaning of the term. The poetical is rarely identical with the personal ego. But on the other hand it cannot be too strongly insisted upon that books (I mean great, inspired books, such as are read for hundreds of years) are never engendered by other books, but by life. Nobody, who has a drop of artist's blood in his veins, can imagine that a poet of the rank of Shakespeare can have written sonnets by the score only as exercises or metrical experiments, without any bearing on his life, its passions and its crises. The formula for good epic poetry is surely this: that it must always be founded on real life, even if rarely or never an exact copy of it. Lyrical poetry, in which the poet speaks in his own name, and especially of himself, must necessarily, if first-rate, be rooted in what the poet has felt so strongly that it has made him break into song.

The learned critics of Shakespeare's Sonnets regard them merely as metrical _tours de force_, penned in cold blood on subjects prescribed by fashion and convention. They look upon fancy as upon a spider, which spins chimera in all sorts of typical and artificial figures out of itself. It seems more natural to look upon it as a plant, extracting nourishment from the only soil in which it could thrive, namely, the observations and experiences of the poet.

The great modern poets, whose lives lie open before us, have betrayed to us how fancy springs out of impressions of real life, transforming them and making them unrecognisable by its mysterious workings. In several cases we are able to discern the dispersed elements, which in due time crystallise in the poem. Discerning criticism has opened our eyes to the intermixture of these elements in the magic caldron of fancy, while inferior criticism goes astray in a trivial search after possible models. In spite of German scholars and their exertions, we know nothing about whom Goethe had in his mind when he painted Clärchen, nor is this fact of any importance; but this is certain, that the whole poetical life-work of Goethe is founded upon experience. When Max Klinger one evening returned home from having seen a performance of Goethe's _Faust_, he said: What most impressed me was that it was the life of Goethe.

As, knowing the life and experiences of the great modern poet, we are now generally able to trace how these are worked upon and transformed in his works, it is reasonable to suppose that in olden times poets were moved by the same causes, and acted in the same way, at least those of them who have been efficient. When we know of the adventures and emotions of the modern poet, and are able to trace them in the production of his free fancy; when it is possible, where they are unknown to us, to evolve the hidden personality of the poet, and--as every capable critic has experienced--to have our conjectures finally borne out by facts revealed by the contemporary author, then we cannot feel it to be impossible, that in the case of an older poet, we might also be successful in determining when he speaks earnestly from his heart, and in tracing his feelings and experiences through his works, especially when these are lyrical, and their mode of expression passionate and emotional.

Any one who holds fast to the by no means fantastic theory, that there is a certain connection between the life and the works of Shakespeare, will be but little moved by successive attempts to deny the Sonnets any autobiographical value, because of the conventional traits and frequent imitations to be pointed out in them.

The modern reader who takes up the Sonnets with no special knowledge of the Renaissance, its tone of feeling, its relation to Greek antiquity, its conventions and its poetic style, finds nothing in them more surprising than the language of love in which the poet addresses his young friend, the positively erotic passion for a masculine personality which here finds utterance. The friend is currently addressed as "my love." Sometimes it is stated in so many words that in the eyes of his admirer the friend combines the charms of man and woman; for instance, in Sonnet xx.:--

"A woman's face, with Nature's own hand painted, Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion."

This Sonnet ends with a playful lament that the friend had not been born of the opposite sex; yet such is the warmth of expression in other Sonnets that one very well understands how the critics of last century supposed them to be addressed to a woman.[1]

This tone, however, is a characteristic fashion of the age. And here, again, it has been insisted that love for a beautiful youth, which the study of Plato had presented to the men of the Renaissance in its most attractive light, was a standing theme among English poets of that age, who, moreover, as in Shakespeare's case, were wont to praise the beauty of their friend above that of their mistress. The woman, as in this case, often enters as a disturbing element into the relation. It was an accepted part of the convention that the poet as above noted should represent himself as withered and wrinkled, whatever his real age might be; Shakespeare does so again and again, though he was at most thirty-seven. Finally, it was quite in accordance with use and wont that the fair youth should be exhorted to marry, so that his beauty might not die with him. Shakespeare had already placed such exhortations in the mouth of the Goddess of Love in _Venus and Adonis_.

All this is true, and yet there is no reasonable ground for doubting that the Sonnets stand in pretty close relation to actual facts.

The age, indeed, determines the tone, the colouring, of the expressions in which friendship clothes itself. In Germany and Denmark, at the end of the eighteenth century, friendship was a sentimental enthusiasm, just as in England and Italy during the sixteenth century it took the form of platonic love. We can clearly discern, however, that the different methods of expression answered to corresponding shades of difference in the emotion itself. The men of the Renaissance gave themselves up to an adoration of friendship and of their friend which is now unknown, except in circles where a perverted sexuality prevails. Montaigne's friendship for Estienne de la Boétie, and Languet's passionate tenderness for the youthful Philip Sidney, are cases in point. The observations concerning friendship in Sir Thomas Browne's _Religio Medici_, 1642 (pp. 98, 99), accord entirely with that of Shakespeare: "I love my friend more than myself, and yet I think that I do not love him enough. In a few months my manifold doubled passion will make me believe that I have not at all loved him before. When I am away from him, I am dead, until I meet him again. When I am together with him, I am not content, but always long for a closer connection with him. United souls are not contented, but wish for being truly identical with each other; and this being impossible, their yearnings are endless and must increase without any possibility of being gratified." But the most remarkable example of a frenzied friendship in Renaissance culture and poetry is undoubtedly to be found in Michael Angelo's letters and sonnets.

Michael Angelo's relation to Messer Tommaso de' Cavalieri presents the most interesting parallel to the attitude which Shakespeare adopted towards William Herbert. We find the same expressions of passionate love from the older to the younger man; but here it is still more unquestionably certain that we have not to do with mere poetical figures of speech, since the letters are not a whit less ardent and enthusiastic than the sonnets. The expressions in the sonnets are sometimes so warm that Michael Angelo's nephew, in his edition of them, altered the word _Signiore_ into _Signora_, and these poems, like Shakespeare's, were for some time supposed to have been addressed to a woman.[2]

On January 1, 1533, Michael Angelo, then fifty-seven years old, writes from Florence to Tommaso de' Cavalieri, a youth of noble Roman family, who afterwards became his favourite pupil: "If I do not possess the art of navigating the sea of your potent genius, that genius will nevertheless excuse me, and neither despise my inequality, nor demand of me that which I have it not in me to give; since that which stands alone in everything can in nothing find its counterpart. Wherefore your lordship, _the only light in our age vouchsafed to this worlds_ having no equal or peer, cannot find satisfaction in the work of any other hand. If, therefore, this or that in the works which I hope and promise to execute should happen to please you, I should call that work, not good, but fortunate. And if I should ever feel assured that--as has been reported to me--I have given your lordship satisfaction in one thing or another, I will make a gift to you of my present and of all that the future may bring me; and it will be a great pain to me to be unable to recall the past, in order to serve you so much the longer, instead of having only the future, which cannot be long, since I am all too old. There is nothing more left for me to say. Read my heart and not my letter, for my pen cannot approach the expression of my good will."[3]

Cavalieri writes to Michael Angelo that he regards himself as born anew since he has come to know the Master; who replies, "I for my part should regard myself as not born, born dead, or deserted by heaven and earth, if your letters had not brought me the persuasion that your lordship accepts with favour certain of my works." And in a letter of the following summer to Sebastian del Piombo, he sends a greeting to Messer Tommaso, with the words: "I believe _I should instantly fall down dead_ if he were no longer in my thoughts."[4]

Michael Angelo plays upon his friend's surname as Shakespeare plays upon his friend's Christian name. These are the last lines of the thirty-first sonnet:--

"Se vint' e pres' i' debb' esser beato, Meraviglia non è se, nud' e solo, Resto prigion d'un _Cavalier_ armato."

"If only chains and bands can make me blest, No marvel if alone and bare I go An armed knight's captive and slave confessed." (_J. A. Symonds_.)

In other sonnets the tone is no less passionate than Shakespeare's --take, for example, the twenty-second:--

"More tenderly perchance than is my due, Your spirit sees into my heart, where rise The flames of holy worship, nor denies The grace reserved for those who humbly sue. Oh blessed day when you at last are mine! Let time stand still, and let noon's chariot stay; Fixed be that moment on the dial of heaven! That I may clasp and keep, by grace divine-- Clasp in these yearning arms and keep for aye My heart's loved lord to me desertless given."[5] (_J. A. Symonds_.)

In comparison with Cavalieri, Michael Angelo could with justice call himself old. Some critics, on the other hand, have seen in the fact that Shakespeare was not really old at the time when the Sonnets were written, a proof of their conventional and unreal character. But this is to overlook the relativity of the term. As compared with a youth of eighteen, Shakespeare was in effect old, with his sixteen additional years and all his experience of life. And if we are right in assigning Sonnets lxiii. and lxxiii. to the year 1600 or 1601, Shakespeare had then reached the age of thirty-seven, an age at which (among his contemporaries) Drayton in his _Idea_ dwells quite in the same spirit upon the wrinkles of age in his face, and at which, as Tyler has very aptly pointed out, Byron in his swan-song uses expressions about himself which might have been copied from Shakespeare's seventy-third Sonnet. Shakespeare says:--

"That time of year thou mayst in me behold When _yellow leaves_, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang."

Byron thus expresses himself:--

"My days are in _the yellow leaf_,[6] The flowers and fruits of love are gone, The worm, the canker and the grief Are mine alone."

In Shakespeare we read:--

"In me thou seest _the glowing of such fire_ That on the ashes of his youth doth lie As the _death-bed_ whereon it must expire, Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by."

Byron's words are:--

"_The fire that on my bosom preys_ Is lone as some volcanic isle; No torch is kindled at its blaze-- _A funeral pile_"

Thus both poets liken themselves, at this comparatively early age, to the wintry woods with their yellowing leaves, and without blossom, fruit, or the song of birds; and both compare the fire which still glows in their soul to a solitary flame which finds no nourishment from without. The ashes of my youth become its death-bed, says Shakespeare. They are a funeral pile, says Byron.

Nor is it possible to conclude, as Schück does, from the conventional style of the first seventeen Sonnets--for instance, from their almost verbal identity with a passage in Sidney's _Arcadia_--that they are quite devoid of relation to the poet's own life.

In short, the elements of temporary fashion and convention which appear in the Sonnets in no way prove that they were not genuine expressions of the poet's actual feelings.

They lay bare to us a side of his character which does not appear in the plays. We see in him an emotional nature with a passionate bent towards self-surrender in love and idolatry, and with a corresponding, though less excessive, yearning to be loved.

We learn from the Sonnets to what a degree Shakespeare was oppressed and tormented by his sense of the contempt in which the actor's calling was held. The scorn of ancient Rome for the mountebank, the horror of ancient Judea for whoever disguised himself in the garments of the other sex, and finally the age-old hatred of Christianity for theatres and all the temptations that follow in their train--all these habits of thought had been handed down from generation to generation, and, as Puritanism grew in strength and gained the upper hand, had begotten a contemptuous tone of public opinion under which so sensitive a nature as Shakespeare's could not but suffer keenly. He was not regarded as a poet who now and then acted, but as an actor who now and then wrote plays. It was a pain to him to feel that he belonged to a caste which had no civic status. Hence his complaint, in Sonnet xxix., of being "in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes." Hence, in Sonnet xxxvi., his assurance to his friend that he will not obtrude on others the fact of their friendship:--

"I may not evermore acknowledge thee, Lest my bewailèd guilt should do thee shame: Nor thou with public kindness honour me, Unless thou take that honour from thy name: But do not so; I love thee in such sort, As, thou being mine, mine is thy good report."

The bitter complaint in Sonnet lxxii. seems rather to refer to the writer's situation as a dramatist:--

"For I am shamed by that which I bring forth, And so should you, to love things nothing worth."

The melancholy which fills Sonnet cx. is occasioned by the writer's profession and his nature as a poet and artist:--

"Alas! 'tis true, I have gone here and there, And made myself a motley to the view; Gor'd mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear, Made old offences of affections new: Most true it is, that I have look'd on truth Askance and strangely; but, by all above, These blenches gave my heart another youth, And worse essays prov'd thee my best of love."

Hence, finally, his reproach to Fortune, in Sonnet cxi., that she did not "better for his life provide Than public means which public manners breeds":--

"Thence comes it that my name receives a brand; And almost thence my nature is subdu'd To what it works in, like the dyer's hand."

We must bear in mind this continual writhing under the prejudice against his calling and his art, and this indignation at the injustice of the attitude adopted towards them by a great part of the middle classes, if we would understand the high pressure of Shakespeare's feelings towards the noble youth who had approached him full of the art-loving traditions of the aristocracy, and the burning enthusiasm of the young for intellectual superiority. William Herbert, with his beauty and his personal charm, must have come to him like a very angel of light, a messenger from a higher world than that in which his lot was cast. He was a living witness to the fact that Shakespeare was not condemned to seek the applause of the multitude alone, but could win the favour of the noblest in the land, and was not excluded from a deep and almost passionate friendship which placed him on an equal footing with the bearer of an ancient name. Pembroke's great beauty no doubt made a deep impression upon the beauty-lover in Shakespeare's soul. It is very probable, too, that the young aristocrat, according to the fashion of the times, made the poet his debtor for solider benefactions than mere friendship; and Shakespeare must thus have felt doubly painful the situation in which he was placed by the intrigue between his mistress and his friend.[7].

In any case, the affection with which Pembroke inspired Shakespeare--the passionate attachment, leading even to jealousy of other poets admired by the young nobleman--had not only a vividness, but an erotic fervour such as we never find in our century manifested between man and man. Note such an expression as this in Sonnet cx.:--

"Then give me welcome, next my heaven the best, Even to thy pure and most most loving breast."

This exactly corresponds to Michael Angelo's recently-quoted desire to "clasp in his yearning arms his heart's loved lord." Or observe such a line as this in Sonnet lxxv.:--

"So are you to my thoughts as food to life."

We have here an exact counterpart to the following expressions in a letter from Michael Angelo to Cavalieri, dated July 1533: "I would far rather forget the food on which I live, which wretchedly sustains the body alone, than your name, which sustains both body and soul, filling both with such happiness that I can feel neither care nor fear of death while I have it in my memory."[8]

The passionate fervour of this friendship on the Platonic model is accompanied in Shakespeare, as in Michael Angelo, by a submissiveness on the part of the elder friend towards the younger, which, in these two supreme geniuses, affects the modern reader painfully. Each had put off every shred of pride in relation to his idolised young friend. How strange it seems to find Shakespeare calling himself young Herbert's "slave," and assuring him that his time, more precious than that of any other man then living, is of no value, so that his friend may let him wait or summon him to his side as his caprice and fancy dictate. In Sonnet lviii. he speaks of "that God who made me first your slave." Sonnet lvii. runs thus:--

"Being _your slave_, what should I do but tend Upon the hours and times of your desire? I have no precious time at all to spend, Nor services to do, till you require. Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour, Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you, Nor think the bitterness of absence sour, When you have bid your servant once adieu; Nor dare I question with my jealous thought, Where you may be, or your affairs suppose; But, like a sad slave, stay and think of nought, Save, where you are how happy you make those."

Just as Michael Angelo spoke to Cavalieri of his works as though they were scarcely worth his friend's notice, so does Shakespeare sometimes speak of his verses. In Sonnet xxxii. he begs his friends to "re-survey" them when he is dead:--

"And though they be outstripp'd by every pen, Reserve them for my love, not for their rhyme, Exceeded by the height of happier men."

This humility becomes quite despicable when a breach is threatened between the friends. Shakespeare then repeatedly promises so to blacken himself that his friend shall reap, not shame, but honour, from his faithlessness. In Sonnet lxxxviii.:--

"With mine own weakness being best acquainted, Upon thy