A New View of Shakespeare's Sonnets. AN INDUCTIVE CRITIQUE. BY JOHN A. HERAUD. A GERMAN writer has recently projected a new theory in regard to the vexed question of Shakespeare's Sonnets. The theory is very characteristic of the national mind, carried, however, to an extreme, so as to be almost an example of the reductio ad absurdum. His notion is, that the poet's dedication "To W. H." means to William Himself, and that all the personal apostrophes are directed to his interior Individuality. This, as I have suggested, is too German. Yet I can see clearly how it is that the critic has found the hypothesis help him in understanding this mysterious series of poems. The ordinary notion, in fact, that because the poems are dedicated to W. H. they are necessarily addressed to the dedicatee, is about as absurd as the merely subjective notion of the Teutonic critic. After a careful reperusal, I have come to the conclusion that there is not a single sonnet which is addressed to any individual at all; and that there is an obvious point of view, in which not only the general drift and design of all the sonnets, as a connected whole, become apparent enough, but the details also abundantly intelligible. I proceed to show the grounds of my position, and to add such illustrations as it may require. The sonnets were written long before they were published, and dedicated to W. H.; or, as it is generally supposed, Lord Southampton. Before this dedication took place, Shakespeare had distinguished himself as a dramatist, and therefore naturally sought the patronage of the nobleman who had the management of the drama at court. He had already dedicated to him his Venus and Adonis and Tarquin and Lucrece, in 1593 and 1594; and the subject of the sonnets had no more special relation to his lordship than had the themes of those two remarkable poems. The German's notion of the sonnets being purely subjective is refuted by the impossibility of the thing. A purely subjective philosophy did not then exist, and an objective poet like Shakespeare was not likely to be its initiator. Undoubtedly there is subjective matter in all Shakespeare's works; but he had formed no exclusive theory of the sort, if any theory at all. That Shakespeare's philosophy is identical with Bacon's is sufficiently proved by Delia Bacon, though she has of course failed in attempting to prove that he is not the author of his own plays. The manner in which she has applied the Negative Instances of the Baconian philosophy, and the marvellous results she brings out by the process, are perfectly convincing on this point. Now Bacon's induction combines both the subjective and objective in one common method; the Shakesperian drama does the same. We can scarcely, therefore, err in applying the Baconian method of induction to an examination of the sonnets. I begin, and shall, indeed, altogether conduct the inquiry with and by inferences. The first seventeen sonnets, I find, are all pervaded with the same theme-a declaration against celibacy. In this we find Shakespeare expressing the Protestant feeling of the time, and moving with the age. That Shakespeare, notwithstanding that in his dramatic capacity he appears to hold the balance pretty even between the claims of the two Churches, was thoroughly Protestant, even to an extreme, is abundantly evident. High-Church and High-State principles are treated by him in a peculiar manner. In Richard II., for instance, we find them stated with great force by the poor king; but ultimately they so fail him as to deprive him at the same time both of his theory and his throne. The truth which he had worshiped becomes falsehood: what, during the fourteenth century, had been orthodox political doctrine, is proved to be the most practical of errors at the end. With the new age, new principles must prevail, and Bolingbroke succeeds to the new inheritance. In the previous tragedy, King John, an express declaration is made against the papacy; and how true he was to the principles of the Reformation is manifest in his dramas of Measure for Measure, Love's Labour's Lost, &c., where Angelo do ubtless represents the Pontiff, and the state he rules over allegorises the Church; and where the declaration against celibacy is repeated with humoristic force, and corroborated with philosophic argument. Nature is tho roughly vindicated. The vice that Angelo would suppress is declared to be of "a great kindred; it is well allied; but it is impossible to extirp it quite, friar, till eating and drinking be put down." Ecclesiastical authority had included marriage and license in the same category; and no man could claim to be a saint who was not also a celibate, or rather esteemed to be so, for the impossibility of all being sincere in this assumption made many to be hypocrites. Against this monstrous injustice the sonneteer utters his protest in the first seventeen sonnets. Each has but one moral, repeated sixteen times. Why this iteration and reiteration, but to enforce a truth with which time was teeming, and which was already destined to inaugurate a new and better age? We must trace the course of the poet's argument. In introducing it, he apostrophises a supposed individual who has resolved on celibacy,—one who was selfishly "contracted to his own bright eyes,"-who would make a famine where there was abundance,-who "within his own bud would bury his content,"-and finally, by his absurd conduct and example, hasten on the end of the world. In these topics the whole of the proposed argument is well-nigh involved; but the poet is intent on enlarging on each and all. He reminds the ideal celibate that at the age of forty his brow will become wrinkled, and that, not having a child to image his former beauty, he will have no living evidence of its existence. In the next place, he urges that celibacy is unjust to the individual, to the world, and to the opposite sex. It is also contrary to nature. Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live? Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive. What acceptable audit canst thou leave? Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee, Which, used, lives, thy executor to be." The law of nature which had been thus violated, the reformation of religion was to reassert. But to continue the analysis, with as little comment as possible. The poet, in the fifth sonnet, proceeds to point out that there is progress in nature and in the seasons. Winter will come at last, and annihilation would ensue, but that nature provides for the same succession another year. In the sixth sonnet, the celibate is called on to make a like provision; the poet justly urging that the use of the gift of reproduction is not invalidated by the abuse of it, and that the fact of such reproduction is man's conquest over Death. The point is enforced with an earnestness almost sublime: "Then, what could Death do if thou shouldst depart, Be not self-willed, for thou art much too fair To be Death's conquest, and make worms thine heir." And now follows an exquisite sonnet, comparing sunrise and sunset. As the sun climbs his way to the mid-heaven, mortals look up and adore. But when he descends into the west, all eyes are turned into the opposite direction. "So thou thyself, out-going in thy noon, The eighth sonnet also illustrates the same argument, by a simile taken from harmony in music, and by a picture in which "sire, and child, and happy mother" are all engaged in " singing one pleasing note." The poet then becomes ironical, and supposes for a moment that the celibate chooses a "single life" out of "fear to wet a widow's eye." But he urges that, if he dies childless, the world will be his widow, and himself be guilty of a "murderous shame," a suicide who loves others as little as he really loves himself. The next sonnet continues the same topic, and condemns him also of a "murderous hate." Coleridge somewhere remarks of Shakespeare's characters, that each is "a translucence of the universal in the individual." The poet, in his sonnets, accordingly seeks to individualise his celibate, and assumes that he is "fair" to look upon, "gracious and kind" in manner, and therefore the more guilty in not being "kind-hearted." And now he calls upon him to consider that, if all men were of his mind, the world itself would only last three-score years; adding: "Let those whom nature hath not made for store, Look, whom she best endowed, she gave thee more; Which bounteous gift thou shouldst in bounty cherish. Thou shouldst print more, nor let that copy die." By assuming these individual advantages for the person supposed to be addressed, the poet much strengthens his argument. Some of these sonnets read as if they were addressed by another Venus to her Adonis ; and it may have been the poet's wish that we should understand them as spoken by a woman. The terms of endearment in the following and other sonnets would then be intelligible enough: "O that you were yourself! But, love, you are No longer yours than you yourself here live. And your sweet semblance to some other give. Yourself again, after yourself's decease, When your sweet issue your sweet form should bear. Who lets so fair a house fall to decay, Which husbandry in honour might uphold Against the stormy gusts of winter's day, And barren rage of death's eternal cold? Oh, none but unthrifts! Dear, my love, you know However this may be, the poet in his own person addresses the celibate, and refers to his own rhymes with satisfaction, inasmuch as they aim to convert him to a more natural course of living. "Who will," he exclaims,― "Who will believe my verse in time to come, If it were filled with your most high deserts? Which hides your life, and shows not half your parts. If I could write the beauty of your eyes, And in fresh numbers number all your graces, The age to come would say the poet lies; Such heavenly touches ne'er touched earthly faces. So should my papers, yellowed with their age, Be scorned, like old men of less truth than tongue; But were some child of yours alive that time, And so the poet closes his exordium, having thus sufficiently stated his proposition. And here we may suitably advert to a remark of Coleridge's, namely, that Shakespeare's minor poems suggest all the power in him of becoming a great dramatist, and this because he was already a great poet. He had shown in them that he was not only capable of writing well on personal topics, but of becoming other than himself in his power of realising objects and persons. He could "become all things, and yet remain the same;" he could "make the changeful god be felt in the river, the lion, and the flame." And thus it is that, in the Venus and Adonis, "Shakespeare writes as if he were of another planet, charming you to gaze on the movements of the lovers as you would on the twinkling dances of two vernal butterflies. Finally," the critic proceeds, "in this poem, and the Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare gave ample proof of his possession of a most profound, energetic, and philosophical mind, without which he might have pleased, but could not have been a great dramatic poet." Thus also, in these sonnets, Shakespeare states his proposition dramatically, and portrays a person in whom it might be embodied. His subject is stated as an Object which he may and does apostrophise. Having so stated it, he proceeds logically to its distribution. Its elements are twofold: those that relate to Love, and those that concern Beauty. In treating of Beauty, he does not appropriate the attribute to the opposite sex, but simply as the property of Man. In the 18th, 19th, and 20th sonnets, his theme is Masculine Beauty; in the last, he recognises evidently an aristocratic type, and describes a man with features and manners soft and lovely as a woman's, but furnished with all the forces by which he can command those of his own sex and fascinate the other, and plenarily endowed with all that could administer pleasure to his partner and insure the reproduction of his own image. He paints, in fact, the sensual man in his noblest type. But he does not stop here. Having thus 'evidenced "his deep feeling and exquisite sense of beauty," and also that he could "project his mind out of his own particular being, and feel, and make others feel, on subjects no way connected with himself, except by force of contemplation, and that sublime faculty by which a great mind becomes that on which it meditates;"-he passes out of the dramatist into the poet, and invests the object of his apostrophe-as he invariably did even his most dramatic characters-with the gifts of his rich imagination and copious affections. His type-man becomes an ideal, and is furnished out of his own mind and heart with the requisite attributes. This he confesses: "My glass shall not persuade me I am old, So long as youth and thou are of one date; Is but the seemily raiment of my heart, This quasi identification of the subject and object doubtless suggested to the German critic the notion on which he has proceeded, that the poet throughout addressed himself. The error is very pardonable, but easily corrected. It was not his ego, but his alter-ego, in the ideal personality, in the universal humanity, that the poet apostrophised. We shall see presently how he takes the Platonic side of the Baconian philosophy, and ascends to an intuition little short of the theological one, and only avoiding it by the shade of a degree. Man becomes all but the theistic logos in the ascending scale of the poet's daring apprehension, and, but for his evident predetermination to keep on this side of the religious aspects of his VOL. V. E |