positions, writes of his dead Estienne de la Boëtie with passionate tenderness which will not hear of moderation. The haughtiest spirit of Italy, Michael Angelo, does homage to the worth and beauty of young Tommaso Cavalieri in such words as these: Heavenward your spirit stirreth me to strain; The learned Languet writes to young Philip Sidney: "Your portrait I kept with me some hours to feast my eyes on it, but my appetite was rather increased than diminished by the sight." And Sidney to his guardian friend: "The chief object of my life, next to the everlasting blessedness of heaven, will always be the enjoyment of true friendship, and there you shall have the chiefest place." The writer of amatory sonnets was expected as a matter of course to express an extravagance of sentiment. But friendship—a marriage of soul with soul-was looked upon as even a more ardent and more transcendent power than love. In Allot's Wit's Commonwealth (1598) we read: "The love of men to women is a thing common and of course, but the friendship of man to man infinite and immortal."1 "Some," said Jeremy Taylor, "live under the line, and the beams of friendship in that position are imminent and perpendicular. Some have only a dark day and a long night from him [the Sun], snows and white cattle, a miserable life and a perpetual harvest of Catarrhes and Consumptions, 1 I find this quotation in Elze's William Shakespeare, p. 497. apoplexies and dead palsies: but some have splendid fires and aromatick spices, rich wines and well-digested fruits, great wit and great courage, because they dwell in his eye and look in his face and are the Courtiers of the Sun, and wait upon him in his Chambers of the East. Just so it is in friendship." Was Shakspere less a courtier of the sun than Languet or Michael Angelo? 1 If we accept the obvious reading of the Sonnets, we must believe that Shakspere at some time of his life was snared by a woman, the reverse of beautiful according to the conventional Elizabethan standard-dark-haired, dark-eyed, pale-cheeked (CXXXII.); skilled in touching the virginal 1 (CXXVIII.); skilled also in playing on the heart of man; who could attract and repel, irritate and soothe, join reproach with caress (CXLV.); a woman faithless to her vow in wedlock (CLII.). Through her no calm of joy came to him; his life ran quicker but more troubled through her spell, and she mingled strange bitterness with its waters. Mistress of herself and of her art, she turned, when it pleased her, from the player, to capture a 1 In Much Ado about Nothing (II. iii.), Benedick describes the woman whom he may love: "Of good discourse, an excellent musician, and her hair shall be of what colour it please God." Hermann Isaac notices that in the old play, The Taming of a Shrew, Katharine is a blonde beauty. Ferando (Shakspere's Petruchio) describes her: more distinguished prize, his friend. For a while Shakspere was kept in the torture of doubt and suspicion; then confession and tears were offered by the youth. The wound had gone deep into Shakspere's heart: Love knows it is a greater grief To bear love's wrong than hate's known injury. But, delivering himself from the intemperance of wrath, he could forgive a young man beguiled and led astray. Through further difficulties and estrangements their friendship travelled on to a fortunate repose. The series of Sonnets, which is its record, climbs to a high sunlit resting-place. The other series, which records his passion for a dark temptress, is a whirl of moral chaos. Whether to dismiss him, or to draw him farther on, the woman had urged upon him the claims of conscience and duty. In the latest sonnets—if this series be arranged in chronological order-Shakspere's passion, grown bitter and scornful (CLI., CLII.), strives, once for all, to defy and wrestle down his better will. Shakspere of the Sonnets is not the Shakspere serenely victorious, infinitely charitable, wise with all wisdom of the intellect and the heart, whom we know through The Tempest and King Henry VIII. He is the Shakspere of Venus and Adonis and Romeo and Juliet, on his way to acquire some of the dark experience of Measure for Measure, and the bitter learning of Troilus and Cressida. Shakspere's writings assure us that in the main his eye was fixed on the true ends of life, but they do not lead us to believe that he was inaccessible to temptations of the senses, the heart, and the imagination. We can only guess the frailty that accompanied such strength, the risks that attended such high powers; immense demands on life, vast ardours, and then the void hour, the deep dejection. There appears to have been a time in his life when the springs of faith and hope had almost ceased to flow; and he recovered these, not by flying from reality and life, but by driving his shafts deeper towards the centre of things. So Ulysses was transformed into Prospero, worldly wisdom into spiritual insight. Such ideal purity as Milton's was not possessed nor sought by Shakspere. Among these Sonnets, one or two might be spoken by Mercutio, when his wit of cheveril was stretched to an ell broad. To compensate-Shakspere knew men and women a good deal better than did Milton, and probably no patches of his life are quite as unprofitably ugly as some which disfigured the life of the great idealist. His daughter could love and honour Shakspere's memory. Lamentable it is, if he was taken in the toils, but at least we know that he escaped all toils before the end. May we dare to conjecture that Cleopatra, queen and courtesan, black from "Phoebus' amorous pinches," a "lass unparalleled," has some kinship through the imagination with the dark lady of the virginal? "Would I had never seen her," sighs out Antony; and the shrewd onlooker Enobarbus replies, "O sir, you had then left unseen a wonderful piece of work, which not to have been blest withal would have discredited your travel." Shakspere did not, in Byron's manner, invite the world to gaze upon his trespass and his griefs. Setting aside two pieces printed by a pirate in 1599, not one of these poems, as far as we know, saw the light until long after they were written, according to the most probable chronology; and when in 1609 the volume entitled Shakespeare's Sonnets was issued, it had, there is reason to believe, neither the superintendence nor the consent of the author.1 Yet their literary merits entitled these poems to publication, and Shakspere's verse was popular. If they were written on fanciful themes, why were the Sonnets held so long in reserve? If, on the other hand, they were connected with real persons and painful incidents, it was natural that they should not pass beyond the private friends of their possessor. But the Sonnets of Shakspere, it is said, lack inward unity. Some might well be addressed to Queen Elizabeth, some to Anne Hathaway, some to his boy Hamnet, some to the Earl of Pembroke or the Earl of Southampton. It is impossible to make all these poems (I.-CXXVI.) apply to a single person. Difficulties of this kind may perplex a painful commentator, but would hardly occur to a lover or a friend living "where the beams of friendship are imminent." The youth addressed by Shakspere is "the master-mistress of his passion (XX.); summing up the perfections of man and woman, of Helen and Adonis (LIII.); a liege, and yet through love a comrade; in years a boy, cherished as a son might be; in will a man, with all the power which rank and beauty give. Love, aching with its own monotony, invites imagination to invest it in changeful forms. Besides, the varying feelings of at least three years 1 The Quarto of 1609, though not carelessly printed, is far less accurate than Venus and Adonis. See note on cxxvi. for a curious error of printer or editor. |