it with a dedication (signed 'W. H.') vaunting his good fortune in meeting with such treasure-trove. When Thorpe dubbed 'Mr. W. H.,' with characteristic magniloquence, 'the onlie begetter of these insuing sonnets,' he used 'begetter' in the sense of 'getter,' 'obtainer,' or 'procurer,' which was not uncommon in Elizabethan English, and he merely indicated in his Pistol-like dialect that 'Mr. W. H.' was a friendly member of the pirate-publisher fraternity who by getting into his hands, or procuring a manuscript copy of Shakespeare's sonnets, supplied the 'onlie' opportunity for their surreptitious issue. In accordance with custom, Thorpe gave Hall's initials only, because he was an intimate associate who was known by those initials to their common circle of friends. Hall was not a man of sufficiently wide public reputation to render it probable that the printing of his full name would excite additional interest in the book or attract buyers. The common assumption that Thorpe in this boastful preface was covertly addressing, under the initials 'Mr. W. H.,' a young nobleman, to whom the sonnets were originally addressed by Shakespeare, ignores the elementary principles of publishing transactions of the day, and especially of those of the type to which Thorpe's efforts were confined. There was nothing mysterious or fantastic, although from a modern point of view there was much that lacked principle, in Thorpe's method of business. His choice of patron for this, like all his volumes, was dictated solely by his mercantile interests. He was under no inducement and in no position to take into consideration the affairs of Shakespeare's private life. Shakespeare, through all but the earliest stages of his career, belonged socially to a world that was cut off by impassable barriers from that in which Thorpe pursued his undignified calling. It was wholly outside Thorpe's aims in life to seek to mystify his customers by investing a dedication with any cryptic significance. No peer of the day, moreover, bore a name which could be represented by the initials 'Mr. W. H.' Shakespeare was never on terms of intimacy (although the contrary has often been recklessly assumed) with William, third Earl of Pembroke, when a youth. Seven years after Shakespeare's death, the first collected edition of his plays was jointly dedicated, in accordance with a fashion very widely followed at the moment by authors and publishers, to the Earl of Pembroke, then Lord Chamberlain, and to his brother the Earl of Montgomery. The words of the dedication which dubs Shakespeare the patrons' 'servant' - confute the theory of the existence of close relations in early life between Shakespeare and Pembroke; they merely affirm that the repeated performances of Shakespeare's plays at Court in James I's reign had drawn to him and to his work the favourable attention of Pembroke and his brother (see p. 168). But were complete proofs of Shakespeare's acquaintanceship with Pembroke forthcoming, they would throw no light on Thorpe's 'Mr. W. H.' The Earl of Pembroke was, from his birth to the date of his succession to the earldom in 1601, known by the courtesy title of Lord Herbert and by no other name, and he could not have been designated at any period of his life by the symbols 'Mr. W. H.' In 1609 Pembroke was a high officer of state, and numerous books were dedicated to him in all the splendour of his many titles. Star-Chamber penalties would have been exacted of any publisher or author who denied him in print his titular distinctions. Thorpe had occasion to dedicate two books to the Earl in later years, and he there showed not merely that he was fully acquainted with the compulsory etiquette, but that his sycophantic temperament rendered him only eager to improve on the conventional formulas of servility. Laws of evidence compel the conclusion that no thought of the Earl of Pembroke presented itself, either to Shakespeare, when writing his sonnets, or to Thorpe, when preparing them for publication. IX THE DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER conclusions re nets.' THE processes of construction which are discernible in General Shakespeare's 'Sonnets' are thus seen to be identical with those that are discernible in the rest of his literary work. specting They present one more proof of his punctilious regard for the Sonthe demands of public taste, and of his marvellous genius and skill in adapting and transmuting for his own purposes the labours of other workers in the field that for the moment engaged his attention. Most of Shakespeare's 'Sonnets' were produced in 1594 under the incitement of that freakish rage for sonnetteering which, taking its rise in Italy and sweeping over France on its way to England, absorbed for some half-dozen years in this country a greater volume of literary energy than has been applied to sonnetteering within. the same space of time here or elsewhere before or since. The thousands of sonnets that were circulated in England between 1591 and 1597 were of every literary quality, from sublimity to inanity, and they illustrated in form and topic every known phase of sonnetteering activity. Shakespeare's collection, which was put together at haphazard and published surreptitiously many years after the poems were written, was a medley, at times reaching heights of literary excellence that none other scaled, but as a whole reflecting the varied features of the sonnetteering vogue. Apostrophes to metaphysical abstractions, vivid picturings of the beauties of nature, adulation of a patron, and vehement denunciation of the falseness and frailty of womankind — all appear as frequently in contemporary collections of sonnets as in Shakespeare's. He borrowed very many of his competitors' words and thoughts, but he so fused them with his fancy as often to transfigure them. Genuine emotion or the writer's personal experience very rarely inspired the Elizabethan sonnet, and Shakespeare's 'Sonnets' proved no exception to the rule. A personal note may have escaped him 'Mid summer Night's involuntarily in the sonnets in which he gives voice to a sense of melancholy and self-remorse, but his dramatic instinct never slept, and there is no positive proof that he is doing more even in those sonnets than produce dramatically the illusion of a personal confession. Only in one scattered series of six sonnets, where he introduced a topic, unknown to other sonnetteers, of a lover's supersession by his friend in a mistress's graces, does he seem to show independence of his comrades and draw directly on an incident in his own life, but even there the emotion may be wanting in seriousness. The sole biographical inference deducible from the 'Sonnets' is that at one time in his career Shakespeare strained all his energies, after the fashion habitual to men of letters of the day, in an endeavour to monopolise the bountiful patronage of a young man of rank. External evidence agrees with internal evidence in identifying the belauded patron with the Earl of Southampton. Thus the real value of Shakespeare's 'Sonnets' to the poet's biographer is the corroboration they offer of the ancient tradition that the Earl of Southampton, to whom his two narrative poems were openly dedicated, gave Shakespeare at an early period of his literary career help and encouragement, which entitles him to a place in the poet's biography resembling that filled by the Duke Alfonso d'Este in the biography of Ariosto, or like that filled by Margaret, duchess of Savoy, in the biography of Ronsard. But all the while that Shakespeare, in his 'Sonnets,' was fancifully assuring his patron [How] to no other pass my verses tend his dramatic work was steadily advancing. His 'verses' were - to on January 24, 1594-5. The elaborate compliment to the Queen, 'a fair vestal throned by the west' (II. i. 157 seq.), was at once an acknowledgment of past marks of royal favour and an invitation for their extension to the future. Oberon's fanciful description (II. ii. 148-68) of the spot where he saw the little western flower called 'Love-inidleness' that he bids Puck fetch for him, has been interpreted as a reminiscence of one of the scenic pageants with which the Earl of Leicester entertained Queen Elizabeth on her visit to Kenilworth in 1575. The whole play is in the airiest and most graceful vein of comedy. Hints for the story can be traced to a variety of sources Chaucer's 'Knight's Tale,' to Plutarch's 'Life of Theseus,' to Ovid's 'Metamorphoses' (bk. iv.), and to the story of Oberon, the fairy-king, in the French mediæval romance of 'Huon of Bordeaux,' of which an English translation by Lord Berners was first printed in 1534. The influence of John Lyly is perceptible in the raillery in which both mortals and immortals indulge. In the humorous presentation of the play of 'Pyramus and Thisbe' by the 'rude mechanicals' of Athens, Shakespeare improved upon a theme which he had already employed in 'Love's Labour's Lost.' But the final scheme of the 'Midsummer Night's Dream' is of the author's freshest invention, and by endowing-practically for the first time in literature—the phantoms of the fairy world with a genuine and a sustained dramatic interest, Shakespeare may be said to have conquered a new realm for art. More sombre topics engaged him in the comedy of 'All's Well that Ends Well,' which may be tentatively assigned to 1595. Meres, writing three years later, attributed to Shakespeare a piece called 'Love's Labour's Won.' This title, which is not otherwise known, may well be applied to 'All's Well.' 'The Taming of The Shrew,' which has also been identified with 'Love's Labour's Won,' has far slighter claim to the designation. The plot of 'All's Well,' like that of 'Romeo and Juliet,' was accessible in Painter's 'Palace of Pleasure' (No. xxxviii.). The original source is Boccaccio's 'Decamerone' (giorn. iii. nov. 9). Shakespeare, after his wont, grafted on the touching story of Helena's love for the unworthy Bertram the comic characters of the braggart Parolles, the pompous Lafeu, and a clown (Lavache) less witty than his compeers. Another 'All's Well Well. |