Many critics argue that the numbing fear of his rival's genius and of its influence on his patron to which Shakespeare confessed in the sonnets was more likely to be evoked by the work of George Chapman than by that of any other contemporary poet. But Chapman had produced no conspicuously 'great verse' till he began his translation of Homer in 1598; and although he appended in 1610 to a complete edition of his translation a sonnet to Southampton, it was couched in the coldest terms of formality, and it was one of a series of sixteen sonnets each addressed to a distinguished nobleman with whom the writer implies that he had no previous relations. Many besides the 'dedicatory' sonnets are addressed to a handsome youth of wealth and rank, for whom the poet avows 'love' in the Elizabethan sense of friendship. Although no specific reference is made outside the twenty Sonnets of dedicatory' sonnets to the youth as a literary patron, and friendship. the clues to his identity are elsewhere vaguer, there is good ground for the conclusion that the sonnets of disinterested love or friendship also have Southampton for their subject. The sincerity of the poet's sentiment is often open to doubt in these poems, but they seem to illustrate a real intimacy subsisting between Shakespeare and a young Mæcenas. Extrava gances of literary compliment. Sir Philip Sidney described with admirable point the adulatory excesses to which Elizabethan patrons of literature were habituated by literary dependents. He gave the warning that as soon as a man showed interest in poetry or its producers, poets straightway pronounced him 'to be most fair, most rich, most wise, most all.' 'You shall dwell upon superlatives. . . . Your soule shall be placed with Dante's Beatrice.' The warmth of colouring which distinguishes many of the sonnets that Shakespeare, under the guise of disinterested friendship, addressed to the youth can be matched at nearly all points in the adulation, in the style described by Sidney, that patrons were habitually receiving throughout the reigns of Elizabeth and James I from literary dependents. It is likely enough that beneath all the conventional adulation bestowed by Shakespeare on his patron there lay a genuine affection, but it is improbable that his sonnets to the youth were involuntary ebullitions of a disinterested friendship; they were celebrations of a patron's favour in vague references to South ampton in the son nets of the terminology—often raised by Shakespeare's genius to the loftiest heights of poetry - that was invariably consecrated to such a purpose by a current literary convention. We know Shakespeare had only one literary patron, the-Direct Earl of Southampton, and the view that that nobleman is the hero of the sonnets of friendship is strongly corroborated by such definite details as can be deduced from the eulogies in those poems of the youth's gifts and graces. friendship. Every compliment, in fact, paid by Shakespeare to the youth, whether it be vaguely or definitely phrased, applies to Southampton without the least straining of the words. In real life beauty, birth, wealth, and wit sat 'crowned' in the Earl, whom poets acclaimed the handsomest of Elizabethan courtiers, as plainly as in the hero of the poet's verse. Southampton has left in his correspondence ample proofs of his literary learning and taste, and, like the hero of the sonnets, was as fair in knowledge as in hue.' The opening sequence of seventeen sonnets, in which a youth of rank and wealth is admonished to marry and beget a son so that 'his fair house' may not fall into decay, can only have been addressed to a young peer like Southampton, who was as yet unmarried, had vast possessions, and was the sole male representative of his family. The sonnetteer's exclamation, "You had a father, let your son say so,' had pertinence to Southampton at any period between his father's death in his boyhood and the close of his bachelorhood in 1598. To no other peer of the day are the words exactly applicable. The lascivious comment' on his 'wanton sport' which pursues the young friend through the sonnets, and is so adroitly contrived as to add point to the picture of his fascinating youth and beauty, obviously associates itself with the reputation for sensual indulgence that Southampton acquired both at Court and was, according to Nash, a theme of frequent comment among men of letters. There is no force in the objection that the young man His youthof the sonnets of 'friendship 'must have been another than fulness. Southampton because the terms in which he is often addressed imply extreme youth. In 1594, a date to which I refer most of the sonnets, Southampton was barely twentyone, and the young man had obviously reached manhood. In Sonnet civ. Shakespeare notes that the first meeting between him and his friend took place three years before that poem was written, so that, if the words are to be taken The evidence of portraits. Sonnet cvii., the last of the series. literally, the poet may have at times embodied reminiscences of Southampton when he was only seventeen or eighteen. But Shakespeare, already worn in worldly experience, passed his thirtieth birthday in 1594, and he probably tended, when on the threshold of middle life, to exaggerate the youthfulness of his noble admirer almost ten years his junior, who even later impressed his acquaintances by his boyish appearance and disposition. But the most striking evidence of the identity of the youth of the sonnets of 'friendship' with Southampton is found in the close resemblance between the youth's 'fair' eyes and complexion and his 'golden tresses,' as described in the poet's verse, and the chief characteristics of the extant pictures of Southampton as a young man. Many times does Shakespeare tell us that the youth is fair in complexion, and that his eyes are fair. In Sonnet lxviii. he points to his young friend's face as a map of what beauty was 'without all ornament, itself and true' - before fashion sanctioned the use of artificial 'golden tresses' - and he obviously implies that an unusual wealth of locks fell about the young man's neck. Shakespeare's many references to his youth's 'painted counterfeit' (xvi., xxiv., xlvii., lxvii.) suggest, too, that his hero often sat for his portrait. Southampton's countenance survives in probably more canvases than that of any of his contemporaries. At least fifteen extant portraits have been identified on good authority- ten paintings, three miniatures (two by Peter Oliver and one by Isaac Oliver), and two contemporary prints. Most of these, it is true, portray their subject in middle age, when the roses of youth had faded, and they contribute nothing to the present argument. But the two portraits that are now at Welbeck, the property of the Duke of Portland, give all the information that can be desired of Southampton's aspect 'in his youthful morn.' One of these pictures represents the Earl at twenty-one, and the other at twenty-five or twentysix. From either of the two Welbeck portraits which depict Southampton as a young man with fair eyes and complexion and with auburn hair falling below his shoulder, might Shakespeare have directly drawn his picture of the youth in the 'Sonnets.' A few only of the sonnets that Shakespeare addressed to the youth can be allotted to a date subsequent to 1594; only two bear on the surface signs of a later composition. In Sonnet lxx. the poet no longer credits his hero with juvenile wantonness, but with a 'pure, unstained prime,' which has 'passed by the ambush of young days.' Sonnet cvii., apparently the last of the series, was penned almost a decade after the mass of its companions, for it makes references that cannot be mistaken to three events that took place in 1603 to Queen Elizabeth's death, to the accession of James I, and to the release from prison of the Earl of Southampton, who had been convicted in 1601 of complicity in the rebellion of the Earl of Essex. The first two events are thus described: The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured Elizabeth's It is in almost identical phrase that every pen in the Allusion to spring of 1603 was felicitating the nation on the unexpected death. turn of events, by which Elizabeth's crown had passed, without civil war, to the Scottish King, and thus the revolution that had been foretold as the inevitable consequence of Elizabeth's demise was happily averted. Cynthia (i.e. the moon) was the Queen's recognised poetic appellation. It is thus that she figures in the verse of Barnfield, Spenser, Fulke Greville, and Ralegh, and her elegists, following the same fashion, invariably likened her death to the 'eclipse' of a heavenly body. At the same time James was constantly Isaid to have entered on his inheritance 'not with an olive branch in his hand, but with a whole forest of olives round about him, for he brought not peace to this kingdom alone' but to all Europe. to Southampton's prison. 'The drops of this most balmy time,' in this same Allusions sonnet, cvii., is an echo of another current strain of fancy. James came to England in a springtide of rarely rivalled release clemency, which was reckoned of the happiest augury. from One source of grief alone was acknowledged: Southampton was still a prisoner in the Tower, 'supposed' (in Shakespeare's language) 'as forfeit to a confined doom.' The wish for his release was fulfilled quickly. On April 10, 1603, his prison gates were opened by 'a warrant from the king.' So bountiful a beginning of the new era, wrote John Chamberlain to Dudley Carleton two days later, 'raised all Circula 'Sonnets men's spirits... and the very poets with their idle pamphlets promised themselves' great things. Samuel Daniel and John Davies celebrated Southampton's release in buoyant verse. It is improbable that Shakespeare remained silent. 'My love looks fresh,' he wrote in the concluding lines of this Sonnet cvii., and he finally repeated the conventional promise that he had so often made before, that his friend should live in his 'poor rhyme,' 'when tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent.' It is impossible to resist the inference that Shakespeare thus saluted his patron on the close of his days of tribulation. Shakespeare's genius had then won for him a public reputation that rendered him independent of any private patron's favour, and he made no further reference in his writings to the patronage that Southampton had extended to him in earlier years. But the terms in which he greeted his former protector for the last time in verse justify the belief that, during his remaining thirteen years of life, the poet cultivated friendly relations with the Earl of Southampton, and was mindful to the last of the encouragement that the young peer offered him while he was still on the threshold of the temple of fame. In accordance with a custom that was not uncommon, tion of the Shakespeare did not publish his sonnets; he circulated them in manuscript. But their reputation grew, and public interest was aroused in them in spite of his unreadiness to give them publicity. A line from one of them: in manu script. Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds (xciv. 14), was quoted in the play of 'Edward III,' which was probably written before 1595. Meres, writing in 1598, enthusiastically commends Shakespeare's 'sugred sonnets among his private friends,' and mentions them in close conjunction with his two narrative poems. William Jaggard piratically inserted in 1599 two of the most mature of the series (Nos. cxxxviii. and cxliv.) in his 'Passionate Pilgrim.' At length, in 1609, the sonnets were surreptitiously sent to press. Thomas Thorpe, the moving spirit in the design of their publication, was a camp-follower of the regular publishing army. He was professionally engaged in procuring for publication literary works which had been |