to Willobie's volume. From such considerations the theory of 'W. S.'s' identity with Willobie's acquaintance acquires substance. If we assume that it was Shakespeare who took a roguish delight in watching his friend Willobie suffer the disdain of 'chaste Avisa' because he had 'newly recovered ' from the effects of such an experience as he pictured in the six sonnets in question, it is to be inferred that the alleged theft of his mistress by another friend caused him no deep or lasting distress. The allusions that were presumably made to the episode by the author of 'Avisa' bring it, in fact, nearer the confines of comedy than of tragedy. At any rate they may be held to illustrate the slenderness of the relations that subsisted between the poetic sentiment which coloured even the most speciously intimate of Shakespeare's sonnets and the sentiment which actually governed him in life. fact in VIII THE PATRONAGE OF THE EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON BUT if very few of Shakespeare's sonnets can be safely treated as genuinely autobiographic revelations of sentiment, there lurk amid those specifically addressed to a Biographic young man, more or less literal hints of the circumstances in Shakespeare's external life that attended the poems' composition. Many offer direct evidence of the relations in which he stood to a patron, and to the position that he sought to fill in the circle of that patron's literary retainers. Twenty sonnets, which may for purposes of exposition be entitled 'dedicatory' sonnets, are addressed to one who is declared without periphrasis and without disguise to be a patron of the poet's verse (Nos. xxiii., xxvi., xxxii., xxxvii., xxxviii., lxix., lxxvii.-lxxxvi., c., ci., ciii., cvi.). In one of these Sonnet lxxviii. Shakespeare asserted: The Earl of Southampton the poet's sole patron. So oft have I invoked thee for my Muse And found such fair assistance in my verse And under thee their poesy disperse. Subsequently he regretfully pointed out how his patron's readiness to accept the homage of other poets seemed to be thrusting him from the enviable place of pre-eminence in his patron's esteem. Shakespeare states unequivocally that he has no patron but one. Sing [sc. O Muse!] to the ear that doth thy lays esteem, For to no other pass my verses tend Than of your graces and your gifts to tell (ciii. 11–12). The Earl of Southampton, the patron of his narrative poems, is the only patron of Shakespeare that is known to biographical research. No contemporary document or tradition gives the faintest suggestion that Shakespeare was the personal friend or dependent of any other man of rank. A trustworthy tradition corroborates the testimony respecting Shakespeare's close intimacy with the Earl that is given in the dedicatory epistles of his 'Venus and Adonis and 'Lucrece,' penned respectively in 1593 and 1594. According to Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeare's first adequate biographer, 'there is one instance so singular in its magnificence of this patron of Shakespeare's that if I had not been assured that the story was handed down by Sir William D'Avenant, who was probably very well acquainted with his affairs, I should not venture to have inserted; that my Lord Southampton at one time gave him a thousand pounds to enable him to go through with a purchase which he heard he had a mind to. A bounty very great and very rare at any time.' There is no difficulty in detecting the lineaments of the Earl of Southampton in those of the man who is distinctively greeted in the sonnets as the poet's patron. Three of the twenty 'dedicatory' sonnets merely translate into the language of poetry the expressions of devotion which had already done duty in the dedicatory epistle in prose that prefaces 'Lucrece.' That epistle to Southampton runs: The love [i.. in the Elizabethan sense of friendship] I dedicate to your lordship is without end; whereof this pamphlet, without beginning, is but a superfluous moiety. The warrant I have of your honourable disposition, not the worth of my untutored lines, makes it assured of acceptance. What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in all have, devoted yours. Were my worth greater, my duty would show greater; meantime, as it is, it is bound to your lordship, to whom I wish long life, still lengthened with all happiness. Your lordship's in all duty, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Sonnet xxvi. is a gorgeous rendering of these sentences: Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage May make seem bare, in wanting words to show it, But that I hope some good conceit of thine In thy soul's thought, all naked, will bestow it; Points on me graciously with fair aspect, Rivals in Southampton's favour. And puts apparel on my tatter'd loving To show me worthy of thy sweet respect: Then may I dare to boast how I do love thee; Till then not show my head where thou may'st prove me. The identification of the rival poets whose 'richly compiled' 'comments' of his patron's 'praise' excited Shakespeare's jealousy is a more difficult inquiry than the identification of the patron. The rival poets with their 'precious phrase by all the Muses filed' (lxxxv. 4) must be sought among the writers who eulogised Southampton and are known to have shared his patronage. The field of choice is not small. Southampton from boyhood cultivated literature and the society of literary men. In 1594 no nobleman received so abundant a measure of adulation from the contemporary world of letters. Thomas Nash justly described the Earl, when dedicating to him his 'Life of Jack Wilton' in 1594, as 'a dear lover and cherisher as well of the lovers of poets as of the poets themselves.' Nash addressed to him many affectionately phrased sonnets. The prolific sonnetteer Barnabe Barnes and the miscellaneous literary practitioner Gervase Markham confessed, respectively in 1593 and 1595, yearnings for Southampton's countenance in sonnets which glow hardly less ardently than Shakespeare's with admiration for his personal charm. Similarly John Florio, the Earl's Italian tutor, who is traditionally reckoned among Shakespeare's literary acquaintances, wrote to Southampton in 1598, in his dedicatory epistle before his 'Worlde of Wordes' (an Italian-English dictionary): 'As to me and many more, the glorious and gracious sunshine of your honour hath infused light and life.' Shakespeare magnanimously and modestly described that protégé of Southampton, whom he deemed a specially dangerous rival, as an 'able' and 'better' 'spirit,' 'a worthier pen,' a vessel 'of tall building and of goodly pride,' compared with whom he was himself 'a worthless boat.' He detected a touch of magic in the man's writing. His 'spirit,' Shakespeare hyperbolically declared, had been 'by spirits taught to write above a mortal pitch,' and 'an affable familiar ghost' nightly gulled him with intelligence. Shakespeare's dismay at the fascination exerted on his patron by 'the proud full sail of his [rival's] great verse' sealed for a time, he declared, the springs of his own invention (lxxxvi.). The conditions of the problem are satisfied by the rival's identification with the young writer Barnabe Barnes, a poetic panegyrist of Southampton and a prolific sonnetteer, who was deemed by contemporary critics certain to prove a great poet and scholar. His first collection of sonnets, Parthenophil and Parthenophe,' with many odes and madrigals interspersed, was printed in 1593; and his second, 'A Centurie of Spiritual Sonnets,' in 1595. In a sonnet that Barnes addressed in this earliest volume to Barnabe the 'virtuous' Earl of Southampton he declared that his Barnes probably patron's eyes were 'the heavenly lamps that give the Muses Shakelight' and that his sole ambition was 'by flight to rise' to speare's a height worthy of his patron's 'virtues.' Shakespeare rival. sorrowfully pointed out in Sonnet lxxviii. that his lord's eyes that taught the dumb on high to sing, And heavy ignorance aloft to fly, Have added feathers to the learned's wing, while in the following sonnet he asserted that the 'worthier pen' of his dreaded rival when lending his patron 'virtue' was guilty of plagiarism, for he 'stole that word' from his patron's 'behaviour.' The emphasis laid by Barnes on the inspiration that he sought from Southampton's 'gracious eyes' on the one hand, and his reiterated references to his patron's 'virtue' on the other, suggest that Shakespeare in these sonnets directly alluded to Barnes as his chief competitor in the hotly contested race for Southampton's favour. When, too, Shakespeare in Sonnet lxxx. employs nautical metaphors to indicate the relations of himself and his rival with his patron he seems to write with an eye on Barnes's identical choice of metaphor: My fancy's ship tossed here and there by these [sc. sorrow's floods] How fears my thoughts' swift pinnace thine hard rock! F chief |