Shakespeare (49 page)

Many of these sonneteers characteristically make use of legal imagery in the course of their poetical love-making. This may perhaps be part of their vocabulary as members of the various Inns of Court, but it suggests some instinctive doubling of law and love in sixteenth-century England. Shakespeare’s own sonnets are filled with the language and imagery of the law. But his mercantile and legalistic mind is at odds with his generous muse, just as his plays often stage the contention of faith and scepticism; from that strife emerges his greatness.

Of course he may not have wanted his sonnets to be printed; there was, after all, an interval of approximately fifteen years between composition and publication. Like Fulke Greville, whose sonnet sequence
Caelica
languished in a drawer, he may have considered them to be private exercises for a select audience. But this does not imply that they are accounts of an authentic passion; Fulke Greville’s poems are governed by a literary rather than a real mistress.

One sonneteer, Giles Fletcher, admitted that he had embarked upon the poetic enterprise, “only to try my humour”;
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that may also be the explanation for Shakespeare’s performance. There is evidence that throughout his career he was inclined to experiment with different forms of literature simply to prove that he could successfully adapt them to his purposes; there was a strong streak of competitiveness in his nature, already manifested in his overreaching of Marlowe and of Kyd, and the sonnet had in this period become the paramount test of poetic ability. So Shakespeare used many of the stock themes—the beauty of the beloved, the cruelty of the beloved, the wish to confer upon him or her the immortality of great verse, the pretence of age in the poet, and so on—and gave them a dramatic emphasis while at the same time handling the form of the sonnet superbly well. He sat down and wrote the best sonnets of all.

The first of them are overtly addressed to a young man, who is encouraged to marry and to breed so that his beauteous image may persist in the world. There has been endless speculation about the recipient of this loving advice, and for many biographers the palm must be awarded to the Earl of Southampton. He had refused to marry Lady Elizabeth deVere, granddaughter of Lord Burghley, and that is supposed to be the occasion for the early
sonnets—commissioned, so it is said, by his irate mother. But this imbroglio occurred in 1591, an early date for the composition of the sonnets, and by the more likely date of 1595 Southampton had begun a notorious liaison with Elizabeth Vernon.

A more appropriate candidate appears to be William Herbert, the future Earl of Pembroke. In 1595, at the age of fifteen, he was being urged by his immediate family to marry the daughter of Sir George Carey; but he refused to do so. This might have been the spur for Shakespeare’s early sonnets. Since William Herbert’s father was the patron of the company for which Shakespeare acted and wrote plays, it would have been natural for him to ask Shakespeare to provide some poetical persuasion. The poems, alternatively, may have been written at the instigation of William Herbert’s mother, the illustrious Mary Herbert; she was the sister of Sir Philip Sidney, and the presiding spirit of a literary coterie in which Shakespeare played a part.

There was another fruitless marriage plan for William Herbert, concocted by his family in 1597, which could have provided a similar opportunity. But the reluctance of the fifteen-year-old Herbert seems a better context for Shakespeare’s advice. It may also help to clear up the confusion concerning the publisher’s later dedication to “Mr. WH.” Could this not be William Herbert, surreptitiously addressed? It would help to explain Ben Jonson’s cryptic dedication to Herbert on the publication of his
Epigrammes
in 1616, “when I made them, I had nothing in my conscience, to expressing of which I did need a cypher.”

William Herbert entered Shakespeare’s life at an opportune moment, but the connections between them can only be puzzled out of inference and speculation. The First Folio of Shakespeare’s works was dedicated to him, and to his brother, Philip, Earl of Montgomery, and in the course of that dedication the author is described to the Pembrokes as “your seruant,
Shakespeare.”
Of the plays, it is stated that the Pembroke brothers “haue prosequuted both them, and their Author liuing, with so much favour” and that “you will use the indulgence toward them, you have done vnto their parent.” There is also a reference to their lordships’ “liking of the seuerall parts, when they were acted.” This implies some deep reserve of affection, and respect, towards Shakespeare. It has sometimes been suggested that noblemen so eminent as the Pembroke brothers would not have formed any attachment for an actor and playwright, but that is not the case. William Herbert, in particular, was to lament the death of Richard Burbage in 1619 and to write from Whitehall to the Earl of Carlisle that “there was a great supper to the French Ambassador
this night here, and even now all the Company are at the play, which I being tender-harted could not endure to see so soone after the loss of my old acquaintance Burbadg.”
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The loss of his other old acquaintance, William Shakespeare, three years before, had no doubt aroused similar sentiments.

There have been many attempts to construct a coherent narrative out of Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence. The first seventeen are overtly concerned with pressing matrimony upon the sweet boy whom the poet addresses, but thereafter the sonnets assume a more intimate and familiar tone. The young man is addressed as the poet’s beloved with all the range of contrary feelings that such a position might inspire. The poet promises to confer immortality upon him but then bewails his own incapacities; the poet adores him but then reproaches him with cruelty and neglect; the poet even forgives him for stealing the poet’s mistress.

Then the sequence once more changes direction and sentiment, with the final twenty-seven sonnets concerned with the perfidy of a “Dark Lady,” by whom the poet is obsessed. The sonnets are also caught up in the soul of the time, with the politics and pageantry of the period, with its informers and flatterers, with its spies and its courtiers, all invoking the panoply of the Elizabethan state lying behind the impassioned speech of the poet to his beloved.

Certain sequences are united by mood and tone rather than by story, and there are various lacunae that make interpretation more like supposition. It is not even clear that the sonnets are addressed to the same persons throughout. One of them, No. 145, appears to have been written to Anne Hathaway at a much earlier date, and there may be other unknown recipients. And of course many of them may have been addressed to no one in particular. In certain places Shakespeare seems to be taking on the conventional themes of sonneteering—the eternal conflicts between Body and Soul, Love and Reason, are just two examples—in implicit competition or rivalry with other poets. The last sonnets on the theme of the “Dark Lady” have been read as an exercise in anti-sonneteering, in which the conventions of the form are used to overturn the usual subject matter. There are hints of supreme dramatic levity here, in the sheer triumph of inventiveness that these sonnets evince. Shakespeare was already well known for his gift of dramatic soliloquy—it was one of his additions to the play on Sir Thomas More—and it is perfectly natural that he should take that form of internal debate and project it upon a sequence of poems. He was trying out different possibilities within the range
of human feeling. We might say that, in the sonnets, he imagined what it would be like to be in the situations he describes. If a consummate actor wrote poetry, this is what it would be like.

There are very clear associations between the sonnets and some of the earlier plays, which seem to clinch the argument that Shakespeare began his sequence in the mid-1590s at the time when the fashion for sonneteering was at its height. There are particular associations with
The Comedy of Errors, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love’s Labour’s Lost
and the disputed
Edward the Third
. A dramatic replay of the scenario in the poems, where a compromised poet seeks the love of a high-born young man, occurs in the relationship between Helena and Bertram in
All’s Well That Ends Well;
it is one of the patterns that Shakespeare’s imagination formed. There are of course complete sonnets in
Love’s Labour’s Lost
, suggesting the complementarity of Shakespeare’s invention; in that play there is also a dark beauty, Rosaline, who may or may not be related to the unfaithful lady of the poetic sequence. We can only say with certainty that Shakespeare was playing with the dramatic possibilities of a black mistress. In
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
, also, Valentine renounces Silvia for the sake of his friendship with Proteus; it is another formative situation replicated in the sonnets. When in the ninety-third sonnet the narrator refers to himself behaving “like a deceived husband,” he is following the pattern of many of Shakespeare’s plays.

The poems are perhaps best seen as a performance. All of them are informed by a shaping will, evincing an almost impersonal authority and command of the medium. Shakespeare seems to have been able to “think” and write in quatrains without effort, which presupposes a very high degree of poetic intelligence. No one would have read such a sequence for autobiographical revelations—they were quite foreign to the genre—and at this late date it would be anachronistic to look for any outpouring of private passion or private anguish. It was in fact only in the early nineteenth century, at the time of the Romantic invention of the poetic selfhood, that the sonnets were considered to be vehicles for personal expression. We may recall Donne’s words on his own love poetry: “You know my uttermost when it was best, and even then I did best when I had least truth for my subjects.”
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It is of some interest that, on five occasions in his plays, Shakespeare associates poetry with “feigning.” So on the sonnets themselves we may remark with the Clown in
As You Like It
(1582) that “the truest poetrie is the most faining.”

What had perhaps begun as a private exercise, commissioned by the Pembrokes, then became an enduring project; sonnets were added at intervals, some of them being dated as late as 1603, until they were finally arranged for publication by Shakespeare himself. In fact the first reference to Shakespeare writing “sugred Sonnets among his private friends”
⁵
appeared in 1598. Some of them were then printed in an anthology of 1599, entitled
The Passionate Pilgrime by W. Shakespeare;
it was suggested at a later date that Shakespeare had been “much offended” with the publisher of this unofficial or pirated edition “that altogether unknowne to him presumed to make so bold with his name.”
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Shakespeare may have been particularly irate because the volumes contained other, manifestly inferior, poems that were not composed by him.

He also added some sonnets at a late stage, and cancelled others, shaping them all into some semblance of dramatic unity. There is evidence of revision, in at least four of the sonnets, which was undertaken later with the purpose of unifying the sequence. There is also a confluence of what scholars called “early rare words” and “early late words”; this mixture suggests that Shakespeare first worked on the sonnets in the early and mid-1590s and then went back to them for the purposes of revision in the early seventeenth century. Other sonnets seem to have been added at intervals between those dates. This intermittent composition also throws doubt upon the presence of any coherent story of love and betrayal within the sequence.

In the first publication of 1609 the sonnets were followed by a longer poem, “A Lover’s Complaint”; that was also standard procedure in the style of Spenser’s
Amoretti
and Daniel’s
Delia
. The whole exercise was perhaps for him a way of asserting his worth as a poet. The question that has exercised scholars for many generations—are these ventures in dramatic rhetoric or are they impassioned messages to a lover?—becomes therefore unanswerable. And that is perhaps what is most significant. Wherever we look in Shakespeare’s work, we see the impossibility of assigning purpose or unassailable meaning.

This of course flies in the face of those who have looked for parallels in Shakespeare’s private life for the characters in the poems. The references to a rival poet, claiming the favour of the young man, have been interpreted as allusions to Samuel Daniel, Christopher Marlowe, Barnaby Barnes, George Chapman and assorted other versifiers. The “lovely Boy” and object of the poet’s passion has been identified with the earl of Southampton. In the late sixteenth century, however, the impropriety of addressing a young earl in
that manner would have been quite apparent; to accuse him of dissoluteness and infidelity, as Shakespeare accuses the unnamed recipient, would have been unthinkable. The “Dark Lady” has been variously identified as Mary Fitton, Emilia Lanier, and a black prostitute from Turnmill Street in Clerken-well. Elaborate stories have been written, therefore, about Emilia Lanier abandoning Shakespeare for a passionate affair with Southampton; the suggestion has been made that the whole experience of loss was then darkened by the threat of contracting venereal disease from this faithless woman. It is very dramatic, but it is not art. It seems to have been forgotten by these clandestine biographers that one of the conventions of the sonnet sequence consisted in the poet magnanimously awarding his mistress to his close friend. Shakespeare was following the tradition in his own explosive way. The fact that the collection was greeted with almost universal silence on its publication in 1609 suggests that there was no inkling of controversy or private scandal connected with it; it is, in fact, likely that the audience of the day found the poems slightly old-fashioned.