Attempts to portray the personality and beliefs of Shakespeare. Emerson thought this easy; CHAPTER X THE SONNETS: FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS IN SHAKESPEARE HAKESPEARE is the most elusive of all men. If any proof of this be required, apart from his works themselves, it is given in the multiplicity of the constructions placed by his admirers upon them. Some of the interpreters, mistaking the perfection of dramatic art for the sincerity of personal confession, have imagined it possible to find in his writings (particularly in the Sonnets) an extensive autobiographical revelation; others, from the plays, have ventured to tell the world what were Shakespeare's religious, philosophical and political opinions. Emerson is quite confident that "Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare," though he prudently hastens to add that "even he can tell nothing, except to the Shakespeare in us; that is, to our most apprehensive and sympathetic hour." In subsequent comments, Emerson lets us see that he had used the word "biographer" in a Pickwickian sense. What he meant was not that Shakespeare's life-story is told in his works, but only that these reveal the poet's convictions as to what is right and wrong, true and false, beautiful and ugly, in character and conduct: which need not be disputed, though we must resist the temptation to find Shakespeare's personal expression only in what we most like in the plays. Matthew Arnold, placing himself at the opposite extreme, pronounces Shakespeare inscrutable: Others abide our question; thou art free: Thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know, Self-school'd, self-scann'd, self-honour'd, self-secure, Didst walk on earth unguessed at. According to Arnold, this spiritual incognito was the necessary condition of Shakespeare's becoming the interpreter and spokesman of all the joys and sorrows of humanity. Arnold de clares it impossible. semblance revelation in the Sonnets. of self The Sonnets are the only portion of Shakespeare's The delusive writings in which we get even the appearance of direct personal disclosures. At first glance, we seem to have in them the story of an intense friendship, marred by betrayal but subsequently restored; and a record of love, made tragic by the perfidy of the beloved, who guiltily seduces the man friend of the preceding poems. We have glimpses of a philoso phy, according to which all that happens in the world is but the endless and inevitable repetition of what has happened before. The air of deep melancholy in these poetic epistles conspires with their seeming intimacy of self-revelation to produce the impression of unaffected sincerity. from this. Taking it for granted that the Sonnets actually Hasty conare what they thus seem to be, many critics have clusions erected romantic structures of interpretation upon them. Shakespeare is assumed to be veraciously recording his own joys and sorrows, his own sin, suffering and repentance. We are told that he is addressing the Earl of Pembroke, as his adoring intimate. Some have even perpetrated the extrava The Dark Evidence against the autobio terpretation. gance of construing the Sonnets as evidence of a scandalous sexual connection between the writer and his man friend-an accusation for which no jot or tittle of evidence is anywhere to be found. The "Dark Lady" addressed in a number of the poems has been identified with a certain Mary Fitton, who is alleged to have been by turns the mistress both of Shakespeare and of Pembroke. Others, on the basis of reckless posthumous gossip, have identified her with the wife of a country innkeeper, the mother of Shakespeare's godson, Sir William D'Avenant.1 In building up such speculations on the meaning of the Sonnets, the writers forget that they are dealgraphical in- ing with the greatest of dramatists: that is, with the man who had the most consummate skill in placing himself in imaginary positions, submerging his own identity in that of other persons, and expressing feelings that had been engendered in his heart quite otherwise than by immediate experience. They also forget, or remain unaware, that during the teering craze last decade of the sixteenth century sonnetteering was a literary craze in England, and that many sequences of such poems were written, almost all of them revolving around themes identical with those treated in the Sonnets of Shakespeare. The evidence on this point has been amassed with crushing completeness by Sir Sidney Lee, who, to my mind, has amply proved his contention that there is no reason to suppose the friend and lover of the Sonnets a real person identical with Shakespeare, or the experiences they relate genuine. The "I" of the The sonnet of the 1590's. Lee, chaps. x-xii and Appendices v-ix. 1 The gossip is to the effect that D'Avenant, when a boy, spoke of Shakespeare as his godfather, and was wittily told not to "take the name of God in vain." But there is no evidence for the implied charge against Shakespeare. Sonnets may well be as purely a dramatic phantom as Romeo or Valentine, or any other of the characters in the plays. cannot have been Pem Against the identification of the man friend of the Sonnets with the Earl of Pembroke there are two conclusive objections. The one is that Shakespeare never had anything to do with that nobleman; and the other is that the "Mr. W. H." to whom the "Mr. W. H." Sonnets were dedicated (not by Shakespeare, but by the piratical editor "T. T.," Thomas Thorpe) can- broke, not by any possibility have been the Earl of Pembroke, or any other earl. Such a man would naturally and necessarily have been accorded his full ceremonious designations-as, indeed, Pembroke was, by this very Thomas Thorpe, in a volume dedicated to him a few years later; and again by Heminge and Condell in the Folio. If he had not been, the dedicator would have suffered a Star Chamber prosecution for an insult to the orders of nobility. nor the Dark Lady Mary Fitton, With the refutation of the Pembroke theory, the Mary Fitton legend, which depended upon it, falls also to the ground. There is no evidence that Shakespeare ever spoke to that lady in his life. Apart from this slight difficulty, the Fitton theory is open to the further objection that Mary was not a dark lady at all, but is proved by authentic portraits to who was have been fair. It is perfectly possible that the woman subject of the Sonnets may have been a purely fictitious personage. fair. friendship There is only one man to whom Shakespeare's Shakeflattering protestations of friendship and appeals speare's for continued favour apply in a fashion consistent for his with what is known from other sources: namely, Southamp Henry Wriothesly, the young Earl of Southampton, ton. to whom the poet in his own name dedicated Venus patron, Professions and Adonis and Lucrece. In the letter prefixed to the Lucrece, Shakespeare, putting into prose a sentiment that to modern ears sounds almost as unrestrained as the poetical avowals of devotion in the Sonnets, begins by declaring, "The love I dedicate to your Lordship is without end." The seeming inof "love" to tensity of such expressions, however, is diminished when we remember that in the Elizabethan period the word "love" was currently used as a mere synonym for friendship or liking, and that all authors used similar extravagant language in addressing their patrons. patrons, especially to Queen Stock themes and poses of the sonnetteers. The most crucial illustration of this state of things is found in the way in which men were wont to apostrophize Queen Elizabeth, with all the seeming ardour of lovers for their mistresses. Many of the dedications of books and poems to Elizabeth, after she was sixty years old, would make it seem that she was still a paragon of personal beauty, and the "soul's idol" of her implorers. Even such first-rank men as Spenser and Sir Walter Raleigh were guilty of absurdities of this kind. The opening sequence of Shakespeare's Sonnets consists of appeals to a beautiful young man to marry and perpetuate his name and qualities in offspring. Southampton at the time was young, unmarried, and conspicuously handsome, and was the only male representative of his line. That he knew Shakespeare and befriended him is a well-established fact. But even this plea for posterity was one of the stock themes of the sonnetteers, several of whom confess unequivocally that the passions and affections that informed their verses were all feigned. Almost every point in the Sonnets, their themes, their metaphors, their violences of flattery and de |