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-VIII-

DRAMATIC SONNETS.

Elizabeth Vernon to her Lover the Earl of Southampton.
The Dark Story: or Elizabeth Vernon's jealousy of her cousin Lady Rich.

Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with, heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace:
Even so my Sun one early morn did shine
With all-triumphant splendour on my brow,
But out, alack! he was but one hour mine;
The region-cloud hath masked him from me now:
    Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;
    Suns of the world may stain when Heaven's sun
        staineth. (33)

Why didst thou promise such, a beauteous day
And make me travel forth without my cloak,
To let base clouds o'ertake me on my way,
Hiding thy bravery in their rotten smoke?
'Tis not enough that through the cloud thou break
To dry the rain on my storm-beaten face,
For no man well of such a salve can speak
That heals the wound, and cures not the disgrace:
Nor can thy shame give physic to my grief;
Though thou repent, yet I have still the loss;
The offender's sorrow lends, but weak relief
To him that bears the strong offence's cross
    Ah! but those tears are pearl which thy love
            sheds,
    And they are rich, and ransom all ill,
            deeds. (34)

No more be grieved at that which thou hast done:
Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud;
Clouds and eclipses stain both Moon and Sun,
And loathsome cankers live in sweetest bud:
All men make faults, and even I in this,
Authorising thy trespass with compare,
Myself corrupting, salving thy amiss;

Excusing their sins more than their sins are;
For to thy sensual fault I bring in sense,—
Thy adverse party is thy Advocate,—
And 'gainst myself a lawful plea commence;
Such civil war is in my love and hate,
    That I an accessory needs must be
    To that sweet thief which sourly robs
            from me. (35)

Those pretty wrongs that liberty commits
When I am sometime absent from thy heart,
Thy beauty and thy years full well befits,
For still temptation follows where thou art:
Gentle thou art, and therefore to be won,
Beauteous thou art, therefore to be assailed
And when a woman woos, what woman's son
Will sourly leave her till she have prevailed?
Ah me! but yet thou might'st my Seat forbear,
And chide thy beauty and thy straying youth,
Who lead thee in their riot even there
Where thou art forced to break a two fold
        truth,—
    Hers, by thy beauty tempting her to thee
    Thine, by thy beauty being false to me! (41)

That thou hast her, it is not all my grief;
And yet, it may be said I loved her dearly;
That she hath thee is of my wailing chief,
A loss in. love that leaches me more nearly:
Loving offenders, thus I will excuse ye!
Thou dost love her, because thou know'st I love
        her;
And for my sake even so doth she abuse me,
Suffering my Friend for my sake to approve her;
If I lose thee, my loss is my love's gain,
And losing her, my Friend hath found that loss;
Both find each other, and I lose both twain,
And both, for my sake, lay on me this cross
    But here's the joy; my Friend and I are one,
    Sweet flattery! then she loves but me alone. (42)

ELIZABETH VERNON TO HER COUSIN LADY RICH.

Beshrew that heart that makes my heart to groan
For that deep wound it gives my Friend and me!
Is it not enough to torture me alone,
But slave to slavery my sweet'st Friend must be?
Me from myself thy cruel eye hath taken,
And my next self thou, harder, hast engrossed;
Of him, myself, and thee, I am forsaken;
A torment thrice three fold thus to be crossed!
Prison my heart in thy steel bosom's ward,
But then my Friend's heart let my poor heart bail;
Whoe'er keeps me, let my heart be his guard;
Then canst not then use rigour in my jail:
    And yet thou wilt; for I, being pent in thee,
    Perforce am thine, and all that is in me. (133)

So, now I have confessed that, he is thine,
And I myself am mortgaged to thy will,
Myself I'll forfeit, so that other mine
Thou wilt restore, to be my comfort still;
But thou wilt not, nor he will not be free,
For thou art covetous and he is kind;
He learned but surety-like to write for me

Under that bond that him as fast doth bind:
The statue of thy beauty thou will take,
Thou usurer that putt'st forth all to use,
And sue a friend 'came debtor for my sake;
So him I lose through my unkind abuse!
    Him have I lost; thou hast both him and me;
    He pays the whole, and yet I am not free. (134)

Take all my loves, my Love, yea, take them all,
What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?
No Love! my Love, that thou may'st true love call,
All mine was thine, before thou hadst this more:
There if for my love thou my Love receivest,
I cannot blame thee for my love thou usest;
But, yet, be, blamed, if thou thyself deceivest
By wilful taste of what thyself refusest:
I do forgive thy robbery, gentle thief,
Although thou steal thee all my poverty!
And yet, love knows, it is a greater grief
To bear love's wrong, than hate's known injury:
    Lascivious Grace, in whom all ill well shows,
    Kill me with spites! yet we must not be foes. (40)

As the reader will perceive, two of the "Latter Sonnets" have here been brought forward; but in grouping these Sonnets together I am not trying to steal any advantage over my opponents, nor am I loading the dice on purpose to play falsely.  I was not the first to recognize a relationship in these Sonnets which proves that there has been a change of places.  Gervinus, followed by others, admits the relationship of these groups, only he would drag Sonnets 40-2 into the back slums of the Latter Sonnets,—not knowing what else to make of them; whereas I bring two of the Latter Sonnets (three altogether) forward, and am able to offer the best of reasons for so doing.  The comparison already made points to their alignment with plays that were far earlier than the time of the Latter Sonnets (see p. 43).  We are in agreement then with Gervinus as to their relationship, although differing completely as to the story they have to tell.

    According to the Autobiographical interpretation, it has been assumed that Shakspeare having a wife at Stratford, also kept a mistress in London, this being the bestializing Circe who is described in the Latter Sonnets as an adulteress in the very "refuse of her deeds;" foul with all unfaithfulness in marriage, the breaker of her own "bed-vow," who had "robbed others' beds' revenues of their rents," and who was so public a prostitute that she could be called the "bay where all men ride," the "wide world's common place."  This is the woman who, as they say, seduced Shakspeare's young friend from his side and thus caused the Poet to suffer a "hell of time" in purging fires.  Mr. Furnivall asserts that in Sonnets 40—2 "Will has taken away Shakspeare's mistress," although he tells us a few lines later on, that in Sonnets 66—70, "Shakspeare is SURE he is PURE, and excuses him!" [34]  This "Will," as previously shown, is an impostor of their own manufacture.  It is a lying delusion to assert or suppose that any person named "Will" is addressed in the Sonnets from the first to the final one.  And if the young friend of the Poet did steal his mistress, it must of necessity have been the man whose poet he was, the man who "made the dumb on high to sing," the living original of Shakspeare's Adonis, that is, the Earl of Southampton, as already established by data the most definite and indubitable. However, this is a fact the autobiographists will not, dare not, look in the face.

    Now, if there were any grounds for such a story, we are bound not to shirk it.  We ought not to lie about Shakspeare because we love him.  We should have no right to alter any known fact of his life.  It might have been pleasant too could we have proved that he had such failings and errors as afforded a satisfactory set-off to his splendour—the foil which should render his glory less dazzling to weak eyes.  There are tastes that would have appreciated his fame all the more for a taint in it!  Besides, we all know what mad things love has done in this world; that while it can see so clearly on behalf of others, it is so often blind for self. We know how this passion has coloured some lump of common earth; how it has clothed spiritual deformity with splendour and grace; how it has discrowned the kingly men and made fools of the wise ones; snatched the empire of a world from Antony; made great heroes lay down their heads and leave their laurels in a wanton's lap; set the wits of many a poor poet dancing like those of a lunatic.  As Armado reminds us, "Sampson was so tempted, and he had an excellent strength; Solomon was so seduced, and he had a very good wit."  Shakspeare with his ripe physical nature, fine animal spirits, and magnificent pulse of rich life, might have been one victim more. It might have been possible for this soaring spirit to be sensually subdued by some witty wanton, and transformed for a time into one of the wallowers in her sty.

    So many apparent possibilities go to make up the world of might-have-been!  Let us admit the possibility.  He might have been.  But was he, and has he left the evidence for a conviction? Has he written Sonnets to record the mutual shame of himself and that friend whom he professed to love with a love "passing the love of woman," and strove to image forth for endless honour?  Did he play the pimp to his own dishonour, as the personal reading of this group of Sonnets would imply?   Was he such a stark fool in his confessions as the one-eyed, folk assume who cannot distinguish his mask from his face, nor his personality from the part he played?  Men may do such things as have been surmised of Shakspeare and his friend, but only Cretins assume that he would have put them into Sonnets to "please these curious days."

    But what we are called upon to question here is not Shakspeare's falsehood, to wife or self or friend, or that friend's falsehood to him when he, the friend, was devotedly in love with Elizabeth Vernon; such hypothetical trifles may be thrown in. What we are concerned with first and foremost is the falsehood to nature that would be perpetrated by this our greatest of all human naturalists, in making pleas so second-childishly puerile and excuses so false and foolish, if this were a matter between man and man, and he and Southampton were the two men.

    Let us for the moment suppose the lying story true.  How then should Shakspeare be the first to attack his friend when he had been the foremost to go astray?  How could he blame him for permitting the "base clouds" and "rotten smoke" to hide his morning brightness, taunt him with sneaking to westward with "this disgrace," hold him responsible for the "base clouds" overtaking himself, and tell him that tears of repentance would be of no avail, that HIS shame could not "give physic" to Shakspeare's grief, for no one could speak well of such a "salve" as that which might heal the wound but could never "cure the disgrace"?  How could he thus throw such puerile and petulant exclamations at the Earl, his young friend, had he been the older sinner?  But for his own connection with the woman, his friend would not have been brought within reach of her snares.  It would be his own baseness that made the Earl's deception possible.  It was he who had let the base clouds overtake both.  The youth could only have loosely "strayed" where the man of years had first deliberately gone.  The friend would see what a pretty comment this was on that "husbandry in honour" which the Poet had urged so eloquently, if he thus admitted that he was living in such dishonour.  The falsehood of falsehoods would be Shakspeare's own, his would be the baseness, black beyond comparison, the disgrace that was past all cure.

    After the death of Tybalt, Romeo, fearing the effect on Juliet, asks—

feeling that this blot of blood on the newly-turned leaf of his life has soaked backwards through the whole book.  So must the Poet have felt if the Earl had discovered any such black stain in his character; if he had found that all the professions of love, sole and eternal, whispered in private and proclaimed in public, were totally false; if he had proved his vaunted singleness in love to be a most repulsive specimen of double-dealing.  With what conscience could the poet turn round when caught by the friend, who had only followed his footsteps, and upbraid him for the disgrace to himself, the treachery to their friendship?  If he had not had a mistress he would not have lost a friend.  Or how could he reproach his friend with breaking a "two-fold truth"—

whilst ignoring his own breach of the moral law and the marriage tie?  The Earl would know what a double-dyed sinner he was; he would see through the moral blasphemy of his solemn twaddle. He would appreciate the value of his arguments for marriage, and his consecration of their friendship, when thus illustrated. He would see how apposite was the exclamation, "Ah me, but yet thou might'st, MY Seat, forbear," and chide him for the "pretty wrongs" committed when he was "sometime absent" from the Earl's heart, IF this absence was for such a purpose.  If the story had been true, then the position taken by the Poet would be utterly fatal, and the arguments foolishly false.  It would be the hardened sinner obviously playing the part of the injured innocent; every charge he makes against his friend cuts double-edged against himself.  How could he dare to speak of the Earl's "sensual fault," and talk of bringing in sense, to look on this weakness of his friend's nature in a sensible way, if he himself had been doing secret wrong to his own reputation, his dear friendship, his wife, his little ones?  How could he thus patronize his frail friend who knew that the speaker was far frailer?  How should he say, "no more be grieved at that which thou hast done," and try to make excuses for him, if he himself had done that which was infinitely worse?  The Earl might weep, and the Poet might speak of the tears as rich enough to ransom all his ill-deeds; but they would not redeem the character of Shakspeare; the friend, with all his repentance, could never have cured the married man's disgrace. He might affect to speak of the Earl's doings as "pretty wrongs" that befitted his years, but his own sins could not be looked on as "pretty"; these could not in any sense befit his own years.

    How should Shakspeare ask—

It is not possible for any man to ask such a question under the circumstances supposed.  It would be too barefaced a bit of hypocrisy!  His cloak!  Why, he would have been travelling forth in the cloak of a hideous and disgusting disguise.  He would be a lecher cloaking himself in a demure morality.  Shakspeare, were he the speaker, could not have travelled forth without his cloak, it would have clung only too near to nature.  Such a method of treating the whole matter would be a blunder worse than the crime.

"And yet thou might'st MY Seat forbear!"

Do you think, now, men or women, that Shakspeare, all alive as he was to an incongruity, the quickest part of whose self-consciousness was his active sense of the ridiculous, would, in the circumstances postulated, claim that "seat" of baseness as his very own, and his only?  He would be the last man to overlook the fact that he could claim no private or personal proprietorship in a woman so notoriously public as the Latter Sonnets paint her. She has been false to her husband's bed (152), not in relation to one person merely, for she has "robbed others' beds' revenues of their rents" (142).  She is described as being all too common for one man to claim or re-claim her as his own.  Shakspeare was somewhat learned in the law of property, and quite familiar with the distinction betwixt that which was several and common property.  And the question is very naturally asked (Sonnet 137)—

Why indeed?  And therefore why write Sonnets to claim it as several?  Why resent the intrusion of a friend to the grazing-ground on a world-wide common?  Also, it is ludicrously impossible for a woman so notoriously public and depraved to have abused one friend by suffering the other to test and prove her, or her truth to him! (Sonnet 42.)  And therefore why blubber about it, and stand in tears self-pilloried in public for the amusement, disgust, or scorn of those who were to read the Sonnets which were written in the friend's album to please those "curious days"?  Shakspeare is supposed to be speaking of or to the same woman in the following manner—

                    LOOK ON THIS PICTURE!

That sweet thief.  (35)

I do forgive thy robbery, gentle thief.  (40)

Those pretty wrongs that liberty commits.  (41)

Thou might'st My seat forbear!  (42)

Sweet flattery, then she loves but me alone.  (42)

                            AND ON THIS!

As black as Hell, as dark as night.  (147)

Robbed other's beds' revenues of their rent.  (142)

In act thy bed-vow broke.   (152)

The bay where all men ride.  (137)

Which my heart knows
The wide world's common place. (137)

Surely if the speaker had been a married man, there could have been no need of charging himself with that one least fault in the world, an overmuch charity in construing; "himself corrupting" by his large liberality towards his friend.  He need not have sought for so far-fetched a fault as that of straining a point in excusing his friend's sins, because "all men make faults," and "EVEN I in this," that is in being so very charitable; the only fault of which the speaker is conscious!  A married man could not charge the single one with his shame for what he had done being inadequate to give physic to his grief.  Nor could he make that appeal to the public, "for no man well of such a salve can speak," if he were known to be a married man who had been found out in keeping a mistress.  It would not be the salve of which men would speak, but the moral sore!  The attitude, the arguments, the personal consciousness, are all wrong when applied to a man who would be himself compromised; they are only possible to an innocent woman.  Nowhere do we meet the blinking glance of conscious guilt; but at every turn of the subject the clear straight-forward look of honest love.  Whatsoever the exact meaning or amount of the charges, there is no hint here of the speaker's being guilty of the like or of any kindred offence against morality.  The speaker is the victim and not the cause of shame, and consequently has the just right to censure and condemn.  There is not one word of contrition or self-reproach; no single reference to his own breach of the moral law, or marriage tie, in all the sage and solemn personal Sonnets which show us Shakspeare's own soul.  How could our Poet, who had so warmly advocated husbandry in honour for the Earl, have written Sonnets for the purpose of picturing the married man and his boy-friend as rivals for the embrace of a mistress; and thus publicly proclaimed his own dishonour?  How could he have been sensitive to the least whisper of ill-fame that was breathed against the Earl, if he himself had been in the stews with him, and done his best to perpetuate the fact by recording the most damning testimony?  How could he have charged his young friend with deception, baseness, and ill-deeds, when, if such things had been true, he would have been first in doing these very offences—ten-fold worse in doing them, and a thousand-fold worse in writing of them?  How could he remonstrate with the Earl on his evil courses, warn him about his health, and tell him that he has grown common, and that is why men speak ill of him? How should he exclaim—

"Ah, wherefore with Infection should he live?"

Wherefore, indeed, if Shakspeare and his mistress had been the primary cause of the contamination?  How could he think his beloved would show "like an Idol," if he had laboured so sedulously to flaw the image he had set up, and so befouled it with dirt?  How would he be able to say at least years after the supposed occurrence—

    How could this be so if he and the Earl had been actors in the dark drama conjectured, and the Poet had written for the purpose of exposure?  His songs could not have been "all alike" devoted to the praise of his unchangeable truth and wonderful constancy, if he had denounced his deception and raged in rhyme against his falsehood.  It could not have been "all alike" on either side if there had been so marked a change in word and deed.  The Earl could not have been constant in his kindness if the reproaches had been aimed at him by the Poet; nor would the verse have been confined to expressing the constancy; nor could "fair, kind, and true" be all his argument if he had passionately proclaimed the Earl as being foul, unkind, and false.  Such Sonnets would contain a lie in each line, known to the Earl as such, and be most astounding specimens of stupendous effrontery.

    Such a view of Shakspeare's character is insanely absurd.  And from all we know and hear of the man—gather from the aim and object of the Sonnets—see of his knowledge of human nature, his instinct for law, his sincerity and fidelity to his friends—we are compelled to indignantly spurn a theory that demands such a sacrifice of truth and probability.  Any one who can think that our Poet would be guilty of such a sacrilege to that sacred sweetness of friendship which he had felt so intimately and brooded over so lovingly, can never have drawn near to the spirit of Shakspeare, and apprehended its uprightness and sincereness—its lofty chivalry and sense of honour—the largeness and clearness of his nature—the smiling serenity, as of the fixed stars—the capacious calm that broods over the profound depths of his soul—the abiding strength of his character, which embodies the idea of power in complaisant plenitude—the infinite sweetness and peaceful self-possession—which are the express qualities of this man, whom Nature bare with so great a love, and endowed with so goodly a heritage.  Such a reading would imply chaos where all was order, stark madness in the sanest of men, fearful folly in the wisest, worthlessness in the worthiest, unnaturalness in the most natural, and be altogether truer to Nat Lee at his maddest than to Shakspeare.  The personal version is altogether impossible.  If Shakspeare had been the lover in the supposed circumstances he could not rebuke his friend for the same "sensual fault" in relation to a proclaimed prostitute: there would be no reason to doubt and no room to question whether there had been a "wilful taste" of her!  Neither could she be taken from the speaker nor restored to him in the sense of the Sonnets.

    If this trumped-up tale of lechery and treachery had been true, and Shakspeare had written Sonnets to upbraid and blackguard his youthful friend, it must have been very early in their companionship.  "He was but one hour mine," says the speaker in Sonnet 33 of the base betrayer, when made the victim of robbery and disgrace.  But in Sonnets so late as Nos. 103—4 and 5, which ARE personal to Shakspeare, and are dated 3 years after the friends first met, the writer when speaking for himself is naturally enough quite ignorant of all that he was previously innocent of.  He assures his friend at this time that his Sonnets, those of his own invention, have no other purpose than to set forth the virtues and proclaim the gifts and graces of that friend.  They are "To one, of one, still such, and ever so;" and of that friend he says—

Here he is speaking for himself and of his Personal Sonnets.  The matters entirely opposed to this declaration are excluded because they were NOT personal to the Poet; they belong to the vicarious or dramatic utterances.

    Shakspeare's primary and persistent object in composing the Southampton Sonnets, was to do honour to the Earl, to show him gratitude, respect, love, and to embalm his beauty, moral and physical, for posterity; not to drag him in the dirt and hold him up to infamy.  He had told all the world that his work was pre-dedicated to this dear friend when he said, "What I have to do is yours."  In every personal glimpse we get, we see a man who feels a most fatherly affection for his young friend.  He counsels like a parent.  He respects the marriage ties, and is anxious to see his friend throned in the purest seat of honour, the sanctity of a home that is blessed with a wife and children.  His spirit hovers about his "dear boy" as on wings of love, in the most protecting way; he cheers, he warns, he comforts him.  He begs that he will be as wary for himself as he will be for him.  The supreme object of his writing is to win honour for the Earl.  He fondly hopes by and by to publicly show himself worthy of the Earl's sweet respect.  In his dedication to the first poem he promises to honour him with some graver labour.  His verse is to EXALT him in life, and in death it shall be his "gentle monument," the "living record" of his memory.  It is meant to distil the sweetness of the friend's life, worth, truth, and goodness; not to haunt him with an ill odour.

    In these his monument shall "shine more bright than unswept stone," and "'gainst death and all-oblivious enmity shall you pace forth, your praise shall still find room," as the noble of nature's own crowning; the man whom Shakspeare delighted to love and respect.  And it is useless for any one to reply that the disreputable affair may have occurred after some of the Sonnets were written, for this pure and lofty tone is the dominant one up to the Sonnet of 1603.

    In the last of the personal Sonnets addressed to Southampton on his release from prison, there is no change in his regards, except that the affection has increased and ripened with time.  We see, right through the Southampton Sonnets, that Shakspeare has most absolutely kept the loftiest moral altitude.  He has preserved his own purity and integrity of soul to have the right of speaking to the Earl as he does at times, whether personally or vicariously.  Whatsoever be the story told or revelations made in this group, it is certain that the Poet HAD reserved, and therefore must have inviolately preserved the right to warn, admonish, and censure his young friend at a later period of the Sonnet-friendship when he has really fallen into evil courses, and is demeaning himself and dishonouring his love and friendship by keeping disreputable company.  Also, when this does occur, it is not in conjunction with Shakspeare, who at least WRITES the reproaches to his young friend, and records his sad regrets that his dear friend, his Sweet Boy, should dwell with sinners, or live with those who infect him, and "with his presence grace impiety," that "sin by him advantage should receive;" who reminds him that the shame which he is bringing on himself by his "deeds" is "like a canker in the fragrant rose," that "spots the beauty of thy budding name;" who also suggests that when lilies fester they smell worse than weeds, and flatly tells him that he has grown common in the mouths of men.  Unless he had purely preserved his right of elder brotherhood, he could not have exercised it to speak the truth in reproach and rebuke in such a painfully unpleasant way.  This plain-speaking would have been the vulgarest impertinence if he had been a fellow-profligate, who had wallowed with his friend in the same soul-staining mire. Such "plain true words" are implied in Shakspeare's claim to speak the truth in love, like the true heart he was, when he reminds his friend that he has been

    Again, in one pathetic group of the Sonnets Shakspeare speaks of his own death and the death of his friend, with a soul brimful of tender love as the summer dew-drop is of morning sun.  No image of disgrace darkens the retrospect of life; all is purity and peace.  The Sonnets treasure up his better part, and they are to "blossom in the dust" with a breath of sweetness and memorial fragrance, when he moulders in the ground.  There is no consciousness of any ill odour emanating from them on account of the illicit relationships which he had written of and permanently perpetuated.  No sign of the lues Browniana, or the "slips in sensual mire."   No shadow of the Dark Story.  On the contrary, he tells his friend—

so far as Shakspeare's own personal feelings had ever been expressed.  Moreover, Shakspeare was quite conscious that the Sonnets were intended to be seen by other eyes than Southampton's own.  When about to write on the fresh subjects supplied by his friend, according to a new method that had been suggested by him, and in a book that was to remain in the friend's possession, he says,

First among these Private Friends would be Elizabeth Vernon after Southampton was in love with her, and seeking to make her his wife.  This alone would make it impossible for such a story to be written in that Book, as the Brownites profess to discover in the Sonnets.  He would be fully aware of the curious inquisition that would be made by the curious eyes of those "curious days." The student of the Sonnets cannot fail to have noticed the startling discrepancies between Cause and Effect, that is the charges made and the excuses proffered; the ease with which the trespasses, the sins and crimes, are glossed over and condoned. The indictment or complaint is elaborated in twelve lines of a Sonnet, and the excuse or gloss is offered in the final two; e. g.,

Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth,
Suns of the world may stain when Heaven's sun
        staineth. (33)

Ah! but those tears are pearl which thy love sheds,
And they are rich and ransom all ill deeds. (34)

                           I an accessory needs must be
To that sweet Thief which sourly robs from
        me. (35)

Hers, by thy beauty tempting her to thee;
Thine by thy beauty being false to me. (41)

But here's the joy: my friend and I are one;
Sweet flattery! then she loves but me alone. (42)

Since my appeal says I did strive to prove
The constancy and virtue of your love. (117)

So I return rebuked to my content,
And gain by ills thrice more than I have spent. (119)

All this the world well knows, yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell. (129)

Yet this shall I ne'er know but live in doubt,
Till my bad angel fire my good one out. (144)

    How inadequate, how puerile, how false would such impotent comments and conclusions be if Shakspeare were the speaker in the circumstances supposed.  But with the lovers for speakers in some of these Sonnets, and Shakspeare treating the subject on behalf of others, and making his excuses for the friend, the matter is brought within the pale of the possible when considered to be a subject of sonneteering.

    My contention is, that the speaker in these Sonnets is a woman, and that in the second group of them it is also a woman who is addressed.  First of the comparative test — to determine Shakspeare's use and wont with regard to the sex.  According to the present reading it is a woman who is addressed by the speaker in Sonnet 40 as that

"Lascivious Grace! in whom all ill well shows."

And in the Play Cleopatra is called that

It is a woman likewise who says of a man in Sidney's Arcadia—

And that is the feeling expressed by the woman-speaker of Sonnet 133.  So Antony calls Cleopatra the Armourer of his heart.

    A Sonnet of Sidney's on the exchange of hearts ought to be compared, as it is likewise spoken by a woman—

    But does Shakspeare himself countenance the hypothesis that a woman may be speaking to a woman in any of the Sonnets?  And is there a double tongue in the mouth of the dramatic mask?

    According to the present reading, the woman speaker in these Sonnets, who is to be identified with Southampton's sweetheart, Elizabeth Vernon, reproaches her lover in some of them and pleads on his behalf in others; and in All's Well that Ends Well there is a passage which in character and situation corresponds to the pleading of Elizabeth Vernon in Sonnets 133—4 on behalf of her lover, as face answers to face in a glass.  Helena blames herself as being the cause of Bertram's going away to the wars, and prays for him—

Compare this with the pleading of the other lady—

He only became a debtor for my sake, she urges; I am the cause of his being in danger.  This is quoted as the testimony of sex to the truth of my interpretation.  The most curious thing is, that Helena writes her letter of parting in the form of a Sonnet.  In this she says—

And she offers to embrace death to set her lover free, just as the other lady offers to be kept a prisoner, so that her lover may go free.  Again, this sentiment of love being the armour protecting the breast is very prettily turned by Imogen, a woman and a wife—

That is, her husband, in the shape of his love-letters, must be torn away for the blow to be struck.

    According to this reading Elizabeth Vernon says to her lover with regard to the lady of whom she is jealous, and who is an intimate friend of both—

"Thou dost love her, because thou know'st I love her."—Sonnet 42.

That is an impossible argument if a man were the speaker.  But the comparative evidence tends to show that it is a woman speaking to a woman.  It is the very argument used by Rosalind, who when speaking of her lover says to her cousin Celia, "Let me love him for that, and do you love him because I do!"  Rosalind had just said to her cousin, "Hate him not for my sake!" thus echoing the Sonnet's

"Suffering my friend for my sake to approve her."

Again, it is a woman speaking to a woman, Viola to Olivia, in Twelfth Night, who says of a lover—

which contains a repetition direct from Sonnet 134

    Elizabeth Vernon calls the "Lascivious Grace," whom she has suspected as being a thief of love

"That sweet thief which sourly robs from me,"

but says to her—

And in the Midsummer Night's Dream Hermia says to Helena—

In both instances it is woman to woman.  The chief importance of these comparisons lies in the fact that the women are Two Cousins in both of the Plays, as I claim them to be in the Sonnets; and so far as the comparative evidence goes we find that Shakspeare allows, illustrates, and warrants this claim.  Further on, the same "Forgery of jealousy" will be traced between Helena and Hermia in the dream-drama that we find in the Sonnets now ascribed to Elizabeth Vernon as speaker to her lover, Southampton, and her cousin Lady Rich.  We are able to apply another comparative test so far as it goes.

    In Elizabethan love-language the names of endearment, "love" and "friend," are often used indifferently, and without distinction of sex.  It was, however, a custom of the earlier time to reverse them, "friend" being used for "love," as though it were the dearer epithet.  The mother of Essex in writing to him habitually speaks of Christopher Blount, who was her third husband, as "My friend."  An original love-letter written by Sir George Hayward in 1550 begins, "My dearest Friend." [36]   A lover in one of Dekker's plays apostrophizes his lady's portrait—

"Thou figure of my friend!"

Surrey calls his lady "my friend," and speaks of himself as her friend.  John Davies says of Paris, "Fair Helen beheld her love, her dear, her friend."  This custom is quite familiar to Shakspeare in the Plays.  Beatrice, in love with Benedick, calls him her "friend"—"For I must ne'er love that which my friend hates;" which is exactly what Southampton says in speaking of himself to his mistress—

"For I must ne'er love him whom thou dost hate."

"He hath got his friend with child," says Lucio of Claudio. "Gentle friend," Hermia calls her lover. "A sweeter friend," Proteus calls Silvia; whilst "friend" is the most endearing name that Juliet can find for Romeo as a climax to the line—

"Art thou gone so, Love, Lord, my Husband, Friend?"

 The significance of the title is still extant with the sexes, although it has been degraded from its earlier rank.  My analysis of the Southampton series shows that in the Personal Sonnets Shakspeare almost invariably calls Southampton his "love."  This title is used seven times over in the first 26 Sonnets; and "friend" not at all.  But with the change to the dramatic method there is also a change to the style of "friend."  In Sonnet 30, the first of these, the person addressed is called "Dear Friend" (p. 103).  According to my reading of what are here termed the Dramatic Sonnets, Southampton calls Elizabeth Vernon "dear friend" in Sonnet 30. In Sonnet 42 Elizabeth Vernon calls Southampton "my friend" three times.  In Sonnets 50 and 56 Southampton speaks of his lady as his "friend."  In Sonnet 110 she is an "older friend" (i.e. in antithesis to "newer roof" and in Sonnet 111 "dear friend." Elizabeth Vernon calls Southampton "my friend" twice.  In Sonnet 133 he is her "friend," "her sweetest friend," and she speaks of him as a friend in Sonnet 134.  In alternation with this, Shakspeare calls himself "friend" in Sonnets 32 and 82, and Southampton (his dearest friend) is only called by that name once—"fair friend," Sonnet 104, where the epithet fair supports the tenderer significance of the word friend, whereas the writer addresses Southampton as his love sonic twenty times over. Although the epithets are not quite invariably applied, there is a large balance to be claimed as the unconscious testimony of a custom of the time in favour of my interpretation of the sexes, and of their relationship in the respective Sonnets.  Hitherto, the one modern sense of the word "friend" has prevailed with readers of the Sonnets, the other curiously corroborative use of it being ignored, and made them think that Shakspeare MUST be addressing his male "friend," whereas the language tells in just the opposite way.  "Love" is the most familiar title, and it is the earliest.

    The attitude of the speaker in Sonnets 33, 34 is that of one who has been wronged, but who has done no wrong; it is the person addressed who is the doer of "Ill deeds," the culprit or criminal. It is the person expostulated with who has deceived and made the speaker travel forth without a cloak.  The person addressed is the cause of all the disgrace, whereas if the speaker were Shakspeare it would be he who had led his young friend into it. Instead, we hear the unmistakable voice of virgin love and maiden modesty; of a shy affectionate nature that fears lest it may have trusted too soon, and feels that it has let fall a veil to be exposed to the public gaze.  Still, the real subject-matter of the Sonnet is not illicit love, or the lady would not try to smile so gaily through her tears of grief and vexation.  No lady in love could say to a guilty pair of illicit lovers—her own lover being one of them—

Nor would such pimpish philosophy be possible to Shakspeare as speaker.  It is only a robbery so far that the speaker can forgive, and call her cousin "gentle thief" so long as she does but steal her lover's society, because it is not a case of illicit love. Thus much is evident from the warning given, "But yet be blamed if thou thyself deceivest by wilful taste of my love in the wrongful way."  She is jealous, suspicious, and fearful—

And

But the speaker does not know that which the autobiographists pretend to know.  She distinguishes betwixt those "pretty wrongs which liberty commits," and the "taints of liberty," or the "drabbing" of the libertine.  These are such flirtations as befit him who is sure to be tempted and wooed by such a syren as her Vivien-like cousin.  The two-fold truth, however, that he breaks cannot be very vital when described as—

The grosser version of Sonnet 42 is no more possible to a woman Man it is to Shakspeare.

    The expression, "Beshrew my heart," is also in my favour. Although not limited by Shakspeare to his female characters, it is an essentially effeminate oath, or rather a feminine form of curse.
I admit there is one point that may be made and urged against the speaker being a woman.  In lines 11 and 12, Sonnet 34, we read—

And if the male sex could be otherwise identified, this "him" would be brought home to the speaker.  But there is no other determinative note of sex, which makes it possible that this is merely a generalization of a well-known fact; "to him" being used proverbially in the sense of "to one" who bears.  Besides which, it was not Shakspeare's cue to communicate the sex of the speaker to us.  That is suppressed, or left to be inferred.

"All men make faults, and even I in this,"

shows me the speaker is a woman.  I read the sense as "All men make faults, and even I, who am not a man," do so.

In a forgiving mood the lady excuses her lover on the ground that all men make faults—that is, commit offences in this way, and she has exaggerated their sins on purpose to make the greater excuse for him.  In this case, as in a hundred others still more obscure, the true sense has not been perceived, only here it seemed possible to make sense by altering the text.  Modern editors following Malone usually print line 8 of Sonnet 35 thus—

"Excusing thy sins more than thy sins are."

Whereas the original quarto reads

"Excusing their sins more than their sins are."

This is the true lection.  The plural belongs to all men, and there was no warrant for the alteration which was made and is still maintained in the interest of the personal theory.  The speaker says, "All men commit faults,"—just as Juliet says of Fortune, "All men call thee fickle!"—"and even I who am not a man do so in authorizing your trespass by comparison with theirs"—not with ours, mark!  In doing this she is "salving" his "amiss" by excusing "their sins more than their sins are."  That is, she exaggerates the sins of men in general, and their proneness to faults, on purpose to make less of his, not to excuse his faults more than his faults are.  The only personal fault of which the speaker is conscious is that of corrupting herself in authorizing the lover's trespass by making this comparison in his favour—"Even I in this am to blame, but such is my love I cannot help it."  Hero is absolute proof that the speaker is not and cannot be that corrupt married man supposed.  If he had been so corrupt it did not remain for him to corrupt himself by being so charitable when salving the misbehaviour of his young friend.

    The subject, however, has a sufficiently serious side.  Lady Rich was a woman who might make any other woman jealous for her own lover, if the "adulterate eyes" of Stella should "give salutation" to his "sportive blood"; and that is the possible position from an amatory point of view.  It is not for me to say or suggest that Southampton was really in love with Lady Rich; not merely because she was ten years older, for she was one of those that laugh at age, and make a fool of Time.  I have nowhere said that he "approached her with any speech of love," or any "avowal of guilty love, so openly as to have caused a family and public scandal," or that Southampton had done this and then asked Shakspeare "to endow his sin with poetic life," as has been alleged.  It would have been very shallow to have suggested anything so absurd.  I said there was only matter enough in this "jealousy" to supply one of the subjects for Shakspeare's Sonnets among his "private friends."  I treated it all through as a case of suspicion, natural and pardonable, on the part of Elizabeth Vernon, considering the fascinating influence of her cousin.  I stated that the most desperate Sonnet of all (144) was only tragic in terms, expressing nothing more than a doubt, and this will be proved.  I could not and did not charge the Earl of Southampton with any guilty love for Lady Rich, when I hold him in Sonnet 120 to tell his mistress that she wronged him by her unjust suspicions in this particular affair of the "jealousy."  But I see no difficulty in supposing that Shakspeare may have cautioned and pleaded with Southampton and "pitched into" him, dramatically, when I find that he has done the same things in other Sonnets. One of two things: either the story told in this group of Sonnets is personal to Shakspeare, or it is not.  If it be a woman speaker, and that it is so there is abundant evidence, it cannot be the corrupt married man supposed; therefore it is not Shakspeare.

    It must be borne in mind that we are endeavouring to decipher a secret history of an unexampled kind.  We can get little help except from the written words themselves.  We must rely implicitly on that inner light of the Sonnets, left like a lamp in a tomb of old, which will lead us with the greater certainty to the precise spot where we shall touch the secret spring and make clear the mystery.  We must ponder any the least minutiæ of thought, feeling, or expression, and not pass over one mote of meaning because we do not easily see its significance.  Some little thing that we cannot make fit with the old reading may be the key to the right interpretation.

    I maintain that Elizabeth Vernon, Southampton's mistress, is the speaker of these nine Sonnets; that the speaker is a woman addressing her lover and the woman-rival who has drawn her lover away from her side; a woman whose love is pure, and who being free from personal blame has a right to reproach both the Earl and the lady who had professed to be the friend of both, and whom she may well suspect of having taken advantage of their friendship to ensnare the Earl and keep him in the strong toils of her wanton grace.  The speaker has suffered an injury through the misbehaviour of her lover, who has exposed her to public comment.

    She reproaches him for having been led away from her when it was yet the early dawn of their love, immediately after they had met.  Her sun had but shone for "one hour" with "all triumphant splendour" on her brow, when the "region-cloud" came over him, and hid him from her.  Still, she will think the best in his eclipse. Her love shall not turn from him.  Even though darkly hidden from her, she will have faith that he will shine again with all the early brightness.  She will believe that the sun in heaven will be sullied by the clouds that pass over it as soon as that her earthly sun can be stained by the clouds which mask him from her now. But the fear increases and the feeling deepens in the next Sonnet. She pleads—

Trustingly, confidingly, she has left her wonted place of shelter; she has ventured all on this new affection.  The morning was so bright, the sun shone with such promise of a glorious day, she has come forth unfit to meet the storm which the gathering clouds portend.  Her unprotected condition is portrayed most exquisitely with that natural touch and image, solely feminine when figuratively employed, of her having travelled forth "without her cloak."  Why did her lover make her do this, and let "base clouds" overtake her on her way?  It will not be enough for him to break through that "rotten smoke" of cloud to kiss the tears off her storm-beaten face, because others have seen how he has treated her.  Her maiden fame has been injured, her maiden dignity wounded.  No one can speak well of such a "salve" as heals the personal wound and cures not the public disgrace; others are witnesses that she has been mocked.  Though he may repent, yet she has lost that which he cannot restore.  The offender may be sorry, yet, as every one knows, that lends but a weak relief to the victim who has to bear the "cross" of a weighty burden.

    There is a passage in the Faery Queen (Book II. ch. i.) somewhat illustrative of Sonnet 34, as assigned by me to the wronged lady, Elizabeth Vernon, who says—

In the Faery Queen we have—

This is written on behalf of a woman who is supposed to have been wronged by a man!  And here too the woman is in disguise—

One easily perceives how Shakspeare would take the hint from Spenser and apply it to his real case of a maiden that had "wronged been."  Also he makes another of his women, Duchess Elenor, exclaim—

"My shame will not be shifted with my sheet."

    Then comes the revulsion of feeling, the relief of thought; she pictures his repentance—

Do not grieve any more, she continues in the next Sonnet, and in a most loving spirit she will make all the excuses she can for him. Sun and moon have their clouds and eclipses, the sweetest buds their cankers, the roses their thorns.  All men have their faults, and even she who is not a man will make a fault in this, that she is authorizing his fault or transgression by comparison with the faults of others, corrupting herself, or herself sinning, in "salving" over his misbehaviour, and in the largeness of her charity, excusing their sins even more than they are; magnifying them to make his less.  She will not only look on this fault of his nature sensibly, but will also try and take part against herself in favour of the "sweet thief" who has robbed her of her lover's presence; such "civil war is in her love and hate" that she must needs be accessory to the theft.  The excuses are still carried on in the fourth of the Sonnets spoken to the Earl.  It is perfectly natural that he should have this tendency to commit these pretty wrongs when she is sometimes absent from his thoughts.  It is a little "out of sight, out of mind."  He is young and handsome, and pursued by temptation.  He is beautiful, therefore sure to be assailed.  He is kind and yielding, therefore he may be won, especially, as in the present instance, when a woman woos, and a woman like this cousin of hers, who has such power in floating men off their feet, once she has fixed her fatal eyes upon them; in whose every grace there "lurks a still and dumb-discoursing devil that tempts most cunningly."

Then follows a bit of special pleading, partly very natural and partly sophistical.  With all the playfulness, however, the earnestness is unmistakable.  Naturally enough she is sorry if she should lose her female friend, for she loved her dearly; but still more naturally she confesses that the loss in love which would touch her most nearly would be the loss of her lover.  The rest of the Sonnet is ingenious for love and charity's sake.  Surely her lover only loves the lady because he knows that she loves her, and the lady loves him solely for the speaker's sake.  Both have combined to lay this cross upon her; they are just trying her; but—

This is the tone in which a woman laughs when her heart wants to cry.

    In the next three Sonnets the address is direct from woman to woman, face to face, and the feeling is more passionate, the language of more vital import.  Here are matters that have never been fathomed; expressions that have no meaning if a man were speaking to a man.  These I interpret as follows:—

    Before the Earl of Southampton met with Mistress Vernon, and became enamoured of her, he was somewhat at variance with the Earl of Essex.  In the declaration of the treason of the Earl, signed D., and quoted by Chalmers in his Suplemental Apology, we are told that emulations (envious rivalries) and differences at Court had risen betwixt Essex and Southampton, but the latter Earl's love for the cousin of Essex came to heal all, and it bound the two up in a bond, strong and long as life, which was only loosened by death.  Also, at the time of Southampton's marriage, the Earl of Essex fell under her Majesty's displeasure for furthering, and, as we learn by Mr. Standen, for "gendering" the matter.  So that from the hour when Southampton and Elizabeth Vernon became one in love, years before they were one in law, the Earl was committed in feeling, and, as we now see, in fact, to the fortunes of the Earl of Essex.

    He followed him through good and evil report.  He held to him although he had to share the frowns of Her Majesty without sharing the smiles which fell on the favourite.  The influence of Essex was often more fatal to friends than to foes, and in this respect the Earl of Southampton was far more justly entitled to the epithet "unfortunate" than was Essex himself.  He was most unfortunate in this friendship, for it seemed perfectly natural when Essex got in the wrong, for all eyes to turn and look at his friends to see who was the cause.  Her Majesty often offered up a scapegoat from amongst his friends in this way.  The worst of it being that these had to stand in the shadow even when he was visited with a burst of sunshine.  In fact, his friends were always in the shadow which he cast.  In these Sonnets, Elizabeth Vernon, as Lady Rich's cousin, feels that she is responsible for bringing Southampton under this "bond" of friendship which binds him so fast through her.  She is bound to the "slavery" of the Essex cause by family relationship, and through his love for her, Southampton has been brought under the influence of Lady Rich's fascinating eyes, through which there looks alternately an angel of darkness and an angel of light, according to her mood of mind; that fatal voice, made low and soft to draw the fluttering heart into her snare; that wanton beauty, which can make all ill look lovely, and whose every gesture is a dumb-show that has but one interpretation for those who are caught by her amorous arts and luring lapwing-wiles, and also for those that watch and fear for them.  Elizabeth Vernon feels that she is the innocent cause of bringing her dear friend the Earl into this double danger—the danger of too familiar an acquaintanceship with Lady Rich, and the danger of a too familiar friendship with Essex, whose perturbed spirit and secret machinations are known to her.  She blames herself for her "unkind abuse" in having brought them together.  "Evil befal that heart," she exclaims to her lady cousin,

"for the deep wound it gives to me and my friend.  Is it not enough for you to torture me alone in this way, I who am full of timid fears, but you must also make my sweetest friend a slave to this slavery which I suffer, and was content to suffer whilst it only tormented me?  You held me in your power by right of the strongest; your proud cruel eye could do with me almost as you pleased.  I was your prisoner whom you kept in confinement close pent.  You hold me perforce, and I will not complain of that if I can only shield my lover from all danger; whoever defends me, let my heart be his guard.  I plead with you; but, alas!  I know it is in vain; you will use rigour in your gaol, and torture your poor prisoners.  I confess he is yours, and I myself am mortgaged to do your bidding.  But let me forfeit myself, and do you restore my lover to be my comfort.  Ah, you will not, and he will not be free.  You are covetous and he is kind.  He did but sign his name, surety-like, for me under that bond which binds him as fast as it binds me, and you will sue him, a friend, who has only become a debtor to you for my sake, and take the statute of your beauty, the right of might, you 'usurer that put forth all to use;' "

that is, she who takes advantage of her loveliness to turn friends into lovers and lovers into political adherents to the Essex cause; "take all you can, in virtue of your beauty and our bond.  Him have I lost; you have us both.  He pays all, yet I am not, cannot be free."  The speaker acknowledges a power which compels her submission.  Then she tries a little coaxing.

" 'Take all my loves, my Love,' what then?  You have only what you had before.  All mine was yours in one sense, but 'be blamed' if you deceive yourself and take it or wilfully taste of it in another sense.  If you would eat of the fruit of my love, come to it fairly by the right gate; do not climb over the wall, as a thief and a hireling, to steal.  For his sake I will forgive your robbing me of his presence and company, although love knows it is far harder to bear this unknown wrong of love than it would be to suffer the injury of hatred that was openly known."

And now we have the summing up of the whole matter, the moral of the story.  The speaker makes her submission almost abject, in obedience to a hidden cause,

    Admitting the speaker to be a woman, there must be more than a story of rivalry in love implied in those lines.  Because if one woman be too friendly with another woman's lover, the sufferer would argue that the sooner she and the one who robbed her mind of its peace were foes the better for all parties.  Rather than continue to suffer and bear until quite "killed with spites," she would say we must be foes, for I cannot, need not, will not bear any longer.  All the more that it is the woman who pursues, an ordinary case would be simple enough.  But there is a secret and sufficiently potent cause why these two should not become foes. The lady fears the fierce vindictive nature of her cousin; she dreads lest the black eyes should grow baleful, and would almost rather they were turned on the Earl in wanton love than in bitter enmity; so deep is her dread of the one, so great her affection for the other.  For his sake she resolves to bear all the "spites" which her cousin's conduct can inflict upon her.  For his sake, she and this cousin must not be foes.  Such is the binding nature of their relationship, that the speaker feels compelled to be an accessory to the "sweet thief" that "sourly robs" from her, by drawing her lover away, possibly to political meetings.  She will be the slave of her high imperious will, and bear the tyranny that tortures her, rather than quarrel.  She will likewise be subtly politic with her love's profoundest cunning.  And this is why there is such "civil war" in her "love and hate;" herein lies the covert meaning that has for so long lurked darkly in these lines.

    No one accustomed to judge of evidence in poetry can fail to see that the old story of a male speaker—a man who is married and keeps his mistress too—and that man Shakspeare, has been told for the last time, so soon as we have discovered a woman speaker, who is thus identified by inner character and outward circumstances.  The breath of pure love that breathes fresh as one of those summer airs which are the messengers of morn, is sweet enough to disinfect the imagination that has been tainted by the vulgar story, whilst the look of injured innocence and the absence of self-reproach, the chiding that melts into forgiveness, which was only intended to bring the truant back; the feeling of being left uncovered to the public gaze and cloakless to the threatening storm; the face in tears, the rain on the cheek, those "women's weapons, water drops;" [37] the natural womanliness of the expression, "Whoe'er keeps (i.e. defends) me, let my heart be his guard," the lines—

—the wrong done to love, which, though unknown, is worse than the known injury of open hatred; the motive, feeling, and excusing words—all are exquisitely feminine; whilst the imagery and symbols correspond in the thoroughest way to the womanly nature of it all.

    The expression "Lascivious Grace, in whom all ill well shows, kill me with spites," as spoken from a woman to a rival, and applied, according to the story for the first time told by me, is just one of those flashes of revelation by which we see nature caught in the fact!  And by the same sudden illumination we catch sight of that Elizabethan Helen, the Lady Rich, seen and known the moment she is named, never to be forgotten.  It is in the political aspect, however, that these Sonnets are most profoundly interesting. When we can adopt the dramatic view, if but tentatively, it becomes evident that the purpose of Shakspeare's writing is not merely amatory.  His jealousy of Lady Rich on behalf of his friend or friends is the genuine passion.  He sees whither the lady is leading.  He knows something of her intrigues, political as well as amatory, for he has watched her out of the corner of his eye this long time past.  His attention to her had been attracted and arrested by Sidney's celebration of Stella.  He has seen the wiles of Cleopatra in the spell she has cast on Mountjoy, her Antony.  He had felt how her black eyes could burn into the souls of men and brand them as slaves bound for the triumph of her baleful beauty.

    As a life-study of the nude in nature she was an incomparable model.  By lightning-flashes he saw in her the revelation of his witty, wanton Rosaline, and brilliant, wilful Beatrice, who reflect somewhat of her daring devilry and wicked wit.  Later, as crowning creations on her line of development, the sumptuous gipsy Cleopatra and the grandly guilty Lady Macbeth.  He studied her, he drew from her, he gloried in her plenitude of power and towering will, but he feared for her influence over his dear friend.  The dark lady attained her darkest and most traitorous character as the political plotter, and he fought against her with all his presaging feeling.  On account of their own blood-relationship the one cousin, Elizabeth Vernon, has brought her lover, Shakspeare's friend, into the toils of the political plotter, Rialta, the promoter of treason against the queen—as we now know her to have been as early as the year 1589.

    Elizabeth and her enfettered lover both drew together under the same yoke imposed upon them by her cousin in the Essex cause, or rather in the cause of James, for whom Lady Rich plotted secretly and laboured strenuously during many years, to be rewarded at last like a worn-out slave by him who called her a "fair woman with a black soul."

    It is in the political, not in an amatory relationship, that the bondage indicated by strictly legal language applies (Sonnet 134).  The speaker as cousin of Lady Rich was already in bondage to that plotter's imperious will, as she confesses — "I myself am mortgaged to thy will;" and this being so, she has brought her lover into the same bondage, the same "toils of grace."  Hence the pathetic plea of love that he may be allowed to go free.

He only became a debtor for her sake—the surety for herself. Thus, if the speaker's jealousy be sexual the writer's is political, and this is one of the ways in which Shakspeare wore the dramatic mask and wrote the "Secret Drama" of his Sonnets.  Later on, in Sonnet 120, we shall find the ranging and returning lover, when in the confessional, does admit that he has been subject to wretched delusions and made the victim of "syren tears"; saluted by "false adulterous eyes;" spied upon and mis-reported.  He there pleads guilty to that "sensual (i.e. selfish) fault" of his nature which he is charged with in these Sonnets, but not in this instance.  He emphatically denies that he was guilty in this particular case.  He says his lady wronged him by her unkindness.  He suffered in "her crime."  And there is proof that she had done so in the fact of her being first to ask forgiveness and tender the "humble salve," the healing balm offered in a penitent attitude, which was most suited to the heart she had so wounded.  The humble salve shows that the lady, on finding herself mistaken, her suspicions wrongful, had eaten "humble pie," and eaten it with a good grace.  And this defence is warranted by the uncertainty and indefiniteness of the Sonnets supposed to contain the charge she made against him.

    This jealousy of Mistress Vernon does not appear to have gone very deep or left any permanent impression.  It certainly did not part the fair cousins, for their intimacy continued to be of the closest, at least up to the time of Essex's death, as is shown by Rowland White's letters.  It was to Lady Rich's house that Elizabeth Vernon retired in August, 1598, and there her babe was born, which she named Penelope, after her cousin.  The intimacy between the three friends remained unbroken after the marriage of Southampton, who we find was one of the chief mourners at the funeral of Mountjoy.  Dr. Grosart, in his sketch of Sidney, prints one of Lady Rich's Letters to Southampton, the postscript of which shows that she had betted upon his forthcoming child being a boy.  She writes, "I hope by your son to win my wager" (vide Biographia).  There was only matter enough in it to supply one of the subjects for Shakspeare's poetry "among his private friends." The Sonnets themselves have no such sombre shadows or ominous significance as they seemed to have when read as personal utterances of the writer.  The most searching investigation yet made will prove that there is not the least foundation for the dark story as told against our Poet, save that which has been laid in the prurient imagination of those who have so wantonly sought to defile the memory of Shakspeare. And for the rest of our lives we may safely and unreservedly hold of him, that he was "too wise to be abused; too honest to abuse."
 
    The 144th Sonnet will help us forward another good stride towards effectually clearing up this most complex matter.

The above is admitted by the autobiographists to be a key-Sonnet!  And such indeed it is.  They look upon it as a key to the whole difficulty.  So it is.  But in a way they have little suspected, and no doubt they will still cling to their treasured charcoal.  This Sonnet has to supply their proof positive that Shakspeare kept a mistress, who is the woman described in the Latter Sonnets as being the vilest of the vile; common as any strumpet of the street.  They are quite sure that Shakspeare was frantically infatuated with such a woman; that his love for her was founded on her unworthiness to be loved, and that he loved her because of the hatefulness of her character (Sonnet 150).  This Sonnet is held to make his confession of the fact that he worshipped this swarthy siren, or "Woman Coloured ill;" that she tempted his fair friend from his side, and that he wrote Sonnets denouncing his friend with being a perjured thief and a robber.  They entertain no manner of doubt that this was the precise position; for them it is an immoral certainty.

    It is here the personal theorists feel themselves most securely entrenched, and altogether unassailable.  It is here they lift the vulturine nose triumphantly and snuff the carrion that infects the air.  They have no misgivings that the scent may be carried in their own nostrils.  And when one ventures to doubt whether the vulturine nose may be the best of all possible guides in a matter which demands the most delicate discrimination, the nicest intuition, the vulturine nose is forthwith elevated in disgust and scorn.  Why, the facts are as plain, to them, as the nose in their face.  If there be one fact patent in the Sonnets, it is that Shakspeare was a scamp and a blackguard, and that he told all the world so, only the world has been too bigoted to believe him.  If you hint that there may be another reading possible; one that is compatible with the Poet's purity, they think you very good to say so; very good indeed, excessively amiable; but you are too youthful, too simple, too unsophisticated.  "Such a view is perfectly untenable to us who know the Sonnets."  By knowing the Sonnets, they mean accepting all the squinting constructions which tend to suggest the moral obliquity of Shakspeare.

    But what says the speaker who sums up the argument pro and con regarding the position in the last two lines of this key-Sonnet? "Yet this" (which includes all they have charged Shakspeare with!)

    That is strangely diffident language after all the certitude of the autobiographists.  The speaker feels no certainty whatever.  It is a case of temptation, of fear and suspicion only!  The speaker says she (or he) may suspect and "guess," but cannot directly tell; having no other evidence except that the two are and have been personal friends, and both are away from her.  The actual truth or state of affairs must be unknown to one who does not know, and who unrestfully remains in a state of doubt!  If Shakspeare were the speaker in this Sonnet then it would give the lie to the story previously told with him as speaker.  Because if that had been true no room could have been left for any doubt or conjecture here.  His friend could not be now described as "a saint" if he had been the guilty sinner already denounced.  Nor could Shakspeare have waited until the present time to be drawn to hell in consequence of his young friend being lured from his side, any more than the friend could have preserved his purity from being corrupted by the same temptress.  The position here is that so far as the speaker knows the friend HAS preserved both his purity in love and fealty in friendship.  Therefore he can be called "my saint."  Neither is this a new temptation and a case of suspicion as such, for the two absent ones were already friends.  The earlier copy of 1599 reads—

"But being both to me both to each friend."

So that they were all three knit together in friendship beforehand.

    According to the personal reading the woman had previously corrupted his saint—save the mark!—to be a devil, and they could be enjoying themselves very comfortably in the lady's hell!  Whereas, according to this Sonnet (144), the friend "right fair" had not fallen, or he would not be called a saint.  As he had kept his purity until now, when the siren is supposed to be wooing it with her fair (or foul) pride, the previous story deduced from the Sonnets could not have been true.

    And yet they say the Sonnets are in their proper order, and that the "Gentle Thief" who was Shakspeare's friend (no matter for the moment which) had already robbed the Poet of his mistress a hundred Sonnets earlier!  In face of the damning charges already made, in the earlier Sonnets, respecting which the autobiographists have no doubt; in face of the character ascribed to the woman all through the Latter Sonnets, the poor simpleton Shakspeare does not yet KNOW, he only suspects, makes a guess, and lives in doubt, until something occurs which can only be described in the language and imagery of the then familiar game of "Barley-Break."

    One needs must feel it to be lamentably iconoclastic to reduce this greatest of all Shakspearian tragedies to a Sonnet on a woman's jealousy, and the Inferno in which the Poet suffered his "hell of time" to the hell that the couple have to suffer in at barley-break; but this has to be done.

    The game of "Barley-break" turns upon breaking the law, [38] and also on being caught and condemned to Hell.  Those who are in Hell are the bad Angels; those who are outside are the good.  To tempt, or lure, catch or carry, the good one to Hell, the female pursues the male player.  When she has caught him he must go to Hell with her and become a devil in the Hell of the Bad Angels.  The Catching is followed by kissing in Hell as it is in the game of "Kiss-in-the-Ring."  And the speaker in the Sonnet has a presaging fear lest this part of the game should be carried out in earnest.  The game itself is played by three couples as described in Sidney's Arcadia [39]—

In the course of the game, as further described by Sidney, Strephon and Nous form one of the three pairs of lovers. He runs away from her, and it is her part to pursue and catch him; these being two of the Good Angels -who are not in Hell. But whilst he is running he plays into the hands of the temptress, and lets himself be caught by Uran, a Bad Angel, the "woman coloured ill," who leads him to her Hell. And it is said—

    Now, in accordance with the law of the game, when the lover is thus taken by the bad angel, his own female partner must also accompany him to Hell.  Thus the way to will her to Hell is to tempt the Better Angel from her side and secure him first, as Uran secures Strephon when he is in the act of fleeing from his own sweetheart.

    Shakspeare's meaning in this Sonnet can only be apprehended by following it according to the laws of Barley-Break.  The rules of the game, and these alone, will explain the lines—

The two Good Angels who are out of Hell are safe from pursuit whilst they keep coupled together.  All the danger lies in their being caught apart by the Bad Angels.  The speaker would have to go to Hell perforce if her lover went, just as Nous is compelled to go there when Strephon is caught, because the game is played by couples of one male and one female each, and when the male is caught and carried off to Hell his female mate is bound to accompany him.

    In Sidney's description, Strephon is taken prisoner by Uran, who represents the "Woman coloured ill" as the evil angel of the Sonnet.  Uran "laid hold on him with most lay-holding grace."  Whilst any pair, male and female, are coupled together outside they are safe from pursuit.  But it was Strephon's desire to be caught when he was running apart from his mistress, and he was caught accordingly.  The player who is pursued by the Bad Angel may be saved by a Good Angel, who is one of an out-couple, if of the opposite sex; but not a male by a male.  "Barley-break" is based on the sexes, and no man can be seduced or saved by a male.

    We learn then from the rules of "Barley-Break" that the "Man right fair" could only be the "better angel" to a speaker who is a Woman; that the "better angel" as a male could only be tempted from the side of a woman, and therefore it is doubly impossible for the speaker to be Shakspeare or any other man.  Of course the Poet's object in adopting the imagery of Barley-Break was to represent and not to misrepresent the exact situation.  Now, as the laws of Barley-Break are strictly observed all through the Sonnet we have only to follow the Rules of the game and play fair to see that the speaker of the Sonnet cannot be a man and must be a female!  The game did not permit of a male pair that could be either severed or saved in this way.  Had the speaker of the Sonnet been a man there would be no meaning in the metaphor. I repeat, the couples were always male and female, whether in Hell or out.  A man could not be the "better angel" to a man—only to a woman, and therefore in accordance with the laws of the game chosen to illustrate the facts from life the speaker must be a woman.  The female nature of the speaker may likewise be glossed and somewhat corroborated by the language of Olivia in Twelfth Night, when she says to Viola, whom she looks upon as a "man right fair," "A fiend like thee might bear my soul to hell!"  The game of Barley-Break could not be applied comparatively with any likeness to life if either Shakspeare, Southampton, or Herbert were the speaker, but with Elizabeth Vernon as the speaker the vraisemblance [Ed.—liklihood, appearance of truth, verisimilitude] is complete.  She has two Loves, one of whom is her comfort, the other is a cause of trouble to her on account of her known character, political and amatory.  The one is a "man right fair," the other that "Lascivious Grace" who is a "Woman coloured ill."  She has the complexion of the Dark Lady who is to be identified in her later character with Lady Rich, the black beauty of Sidney's Sonnets.

    These two Loves, her Lover and female friend, are both away from her and both are friends to each other.  Naturally enough, Elizabeth Vernon is jealous of this "female evil," this "Lascivious Grace," in whom all ill looks well; such is the subtlety of the traitor's charm.  Her fear and suspicion of the actual state of affairs are expressed in the imagery, figures, positions, and the characters of Barley-Break.  Her lover being away from her is open to be assailed and caught by the bad Angel, if she should "woo his purity with her foul pride;" she who is so winning in her witchery that she has the power to tempt a saint to become a devil.  But whether the Good Angel has turned fiend and joined the Bad Angel in Hell or not the speaker does not know with any certitude.  She guesses the good Angel may be in the bad one's Hell, but lives in doubt until the Bad one "fire the good one out."  Much usually does turn upon an "if," and all turns upon it here.  It is IF the Angel has turned fiend; IF the friend has played false; IF the woman should wilfully taste of the speaker's love in an illegitimate way!   Thus the Sonnet which has been considered the most conclusive by the autobiographists is based on a fear, a jealous doubt, a supposition, and is provably, positively inconclusive of anything against Shakspeare or anybody else.  For it is but Sonneteering after all! and this game of Barley Break is not the tragedy of Shakspeare's heart-break.  Of course it is open to the autobiographists to swear that Shakspeare did reverse the imagery here, as they are forced to make him violate the sex in its imagery elsewhere, and to say that he adopted on purpose to apply the game of Barley-Break in that one relationship of the sexes, i.e. to the coupling of two males, wherein it did not and could not apply!  But we know better than that.  Shakspeare's poetic accuracy is scientific in its verifiable truth to nature. Those who do not know this cannot know him; and it is rigorously impossible that he should have taken the "Game of Barley-Break" for the express purpose of portraying the position of lovers, and applied its elaborate figures to a case wherein it could not be made to apply.  The Game was thoroughly understood by the readers of that "Curious age." And this will supply my concluding proof that the speaker of these Sonnets is s a woman.  The present explanation presents a case of swallow or choke for the autobiographists.  The worst of it is they are so ludicrously lacking in all sense of the absurd. There is nothing too ridiculous for them to entertain it seriously.  They fail to see the humour of the positions they suggest.  If Shakspeare were the speaker in Sonnet 134 who says, "but thou wilt not" (restore him) "nor he will not be free," the obvious retort would he that his friend had been too free already.  Again, if he were the speaker in Sonnet 34 who says, "Though thou repent yet I have still the loss," the natural reply would be "Why so?  You can have the woman again.  Her character remains as it was."  With a most owlish gravity Mr. Tyler can express his doubt in a public meeting, and then repeat it in print, whether his dark lady, Mary Fytton (who is not known to have been dark of complexion nor of so black a character), did actually reside in the same lodging with Shakspeare!  And why!  Because Sonnet 144 says, "I guess one Angel in another's Hell!"  Her Hell being opposed to his dwelling-house. We want Charles Lamb to lend a hand and share the laugh at so huge a joke!  No one person is equal to the enjoyment of it!  We cannot but wish that they had among them one thousandth part of Shakspeare's own ticklesome humour and protective sense of the ridiculous.

    Finally, in questioning this hypothesis of Shakspeare's guilt being thus exhibited by himself, an earnest inquirer might like to ask its supporters why they should limit Shakspeare to having one mistress?  Why?  If he were the speaker of Sonnet 40 in the circumstances supposed, instead of "offering to give up his mistress to his friend Will," as Mr. Furnivall witnesses, he would be surrendering a whole harem of them, for the speaker begins this Sonnet by saying—

"Take all my Loves, my Love, yea take them, all!"

Here the charge of his keeping a mistress is ludicrously falsified by the language of Shakspeare himself, who would confess to keeping such a number that one might be reckoned none.  With a chance like this for charging him with keeping a harem of lady-loves, it is manifestly puerile to prefer the minor charge of keeping a mistress!  So little do these traducers know their own trade; so unworthy are they of the liberty offered to them by the Sonnets; so blind are they to their own folly from lack of the protective sense of humour.

    In this Sonnet there is an absence contemplated.  But not the absence of the speaker.  Shakspeare would not speak of his own absence as proving a torment to his friend!  It is Southampton who is going away, and the Poet proposes to take advantage of this separation by writing about his friend during his absence abroad.  He will entertain the time of his friend's absence with thoughts of love.  To praise the friend whilst they are together is unnecessary, because they are so much one that it is like praising himself.  Even for this, he says, let us be divided by distance, if by nothing else, so that he can, as it were, hold his friend, the better part of himself, at arm's length, to look on his virtues and praise his worth, and give that due to him which is the friend's alone.  This Sonnet establishes the fact that the Earl is about to go abroad or to leave home, and that Shakspeare intends to sing of him, to write about him, whilst he is away. The Poet stops at home—"here"—to sing of him who "doth hence remain."  It is a somewhat fantastic excuse for a parting, and very different from the lovers' parting that follows, but it suffices to show what the Poet was expected to do in the absence of that friend who supplied his own "sweet argument" for the Love-Sonnets, and lent the Poet's imagination light.  He is to represent Southampton dramatically, and double him by writing about him during his absence abroad.

-IX-

DRAMATIC SONNETS.


Southampton to Elizabeth Vernon—at parting, in absence abroad, and on
the return home.

Let me confess that we two must be twain,
Although our undivided loves are one:
So shall those blots that do with me remain
Without thy help by me be borne alone:
In our two loves there is but one respect,
Though in our lives a separable spite,
Which though it alter not love's sole effect,
Yet doth it steal sweet hours from love's delight:
I may not evermore acknowledge thee,
Lest my bewailèd guilt should do thee shame,
Nor thou with public kindness honour me,
Unless thou take that honour from thy name:
    But do not so, I love thee in such sort,
    As, thou being mine, mine is thy good report. (36)
 
As a decrepit father takes delight
To see his active child do deeds of youth,
So I, made lame by Fortune's dearest spite,
Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth;
For whether beauty, birth, or wealth, or wit,
Or any of these all, or all, or more,
Entitled in thy parts do crownèd sit,
I make my love engrafted to this store:
So then I am not lame, poor, nor despised,
Whilst that this shadow doth such substance give,
That I in thy abundance am sufficed,
And by a part of all thy glory live:
    Look what is best, that best I wish in thee;
    This wish I have; then ten times happy me. (37)


Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,
The dear repose for limbs with travel tired;
But then begins a journey in my head
To work my mind when body's work's expired:
For then my thoughts (from far, where I abide)
Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee,
And keep my drooping eyelids open wide,
Looking on darkness which the blind do see:
Save that my soul's imaginary sight
Presents thy shadow to my sightless view,
Which, like a jewel hung in ghastly night,
Makes black night beauteous, and her old face new:
    Lo, thus, by day my limbs, by night my mind
    For thee, and for myself, no quiet find. (27)


How can I then return in happy plight,
That am debarred the benefit of rest?
When Day's oppression is not eased by Night,
But Day by Night and Night by Day oppressed;
And each, though enemies to either's reign,
Do in consent shake hands to torture me,
The one by toil, the other to complain
How far I toil; still farther off from thee:
I tell the day, to please him, thou art bright,
And dost him grace when clouds do blot the
        heaven:
So flatter I the swart-complexioned Night,
When sparkling stars twire not, thou gild'st the
        Even:
    But Day doth daily draw my sorrows longer,
    And Night doth nightly make grief's length seem
             stronger. (28)

When most I wink then do mine eyes best see,
For all the day they view things unrespected:
But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee,
And, darkly bright, are bright in dark directed!
Then thou, whose shadow shadows doth make
        bright,
How would thy shadow's form form happy show
To the clear day with thy much clearer light,
When to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so?
How would—I say—mine eyes be blessed made
By looking on thee in the living day,
When in dead night thy fair, imperfect shade
Through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay?
    All days are nights to see till I see thee:
    And nights bright days when dreams do shew
            thee me.  (43)                                                      [40]

Is it thy will thy image should keep open
My heavy eyelids to the weary night?
Dost thou desire my slumbers should be broken,
While shadows, like to thee, do mock my sight?
Is it thy spirit that thou send'st from thee
So far from home, into my deeds to pry;
To find out shames and idle hours in me,
The scope and tenor of thy jealousy?
Oh no! thy love, though much, is not so great;
It is any love that keeps mine eye awake;
Mine own true love that doth my rest defeat,
To play the watchman ever for thy sake:
    For thee watch I, whilst thou dost wake elsewhere,
    From me far off, with others all-too-near. (61)  [41]

If the dull substance of my flesh were thought,
Injurious distance should not stop my way,
For then, despite of space, I would be brought
From limits far remote, where thou dost stay,      [42]
No matter then altho' my foot did stand
Upon the farthest earth removed from thee,
For nimble thought can jump both sea and land,
As soon as think the place where he would be:
But, ah! thought kills me that I am not thought
To leap large lengths of miles when thou art       [43]
        gone,
But that so much of earth and water wrought
I must attend Time's leisure with my moan;
    Receiving nought by elements so slow
    But heavy tears, badges of either's woe. (44)

The other two, slight Air and purging Fire,
Are both with thee, wherever I abide;
The first my thought, the other my desire,
These present, absent with swift motion slide:
For when these quicker elements are gone
In tender embassy of love to thee,
My life being made of four, with two alone
Sinks down to death oppressed with melancholy,
Until life's composition be recured
By those swift messengers returned from thee,
Who even but now come back again, assured
Of thy fair health, recounting it to me!
    This told I joy, but then no longer glad,
    I send them back again, and straight grow
            sad. (45)

Mine eye and heart are at a mortal war,
How to decide the conquest of thy sight;
Mine eye my heart thy picture's sight would bar,
My heart mine eye the freedom of that right:
My heart doth plead that thou in him doth lie,
(A closet never pierced with crystal eyes)
But the defendant doth that plea deny,
And says, in him thy fair appearance lies;
To 'cide this title is impanellèd
A 'quest of thoughts, all tenants to the heart,
And by their verdict is determinèd
The clear eye's moiety, and the dear heart's part:
    As thus,—mine eye's due is thine outward part:
    And my heart's right thine inward love of heart. (46)

Betwixt mine eye and heart a league is took,
And each doth good turns now unto the other:
When that mine eye is famished for a look,
Or heart in love with sighs himself doth smother,
With my love's picture then my eye doth feast,
And to the painted banquet bids my heart;
Another time mine eye is my heart's guest,
And in his thoughts of love doth share a part:
So, either by thy Picture or my love,
Thyself away art present still with me;
For thou not farther than my thoughts canst move,
And I am still with them, and they with thee;
    Or if they sleep, thy Picture in my sight
    Awakes my heart to heart's and eye's
            delight. (47) [44]

How careful was I, when I took my way,
Each trifle under truest bars to thrust,
That to my use it might unusèd stay
From hands of falsehood, in sure words of trust:
But thou, to whom my jewels trifles are,               [45]
Most worthy comfort, now my greatest grief,
Then best of dearest, and mine only care,
Art left the prey of every vulgar thief;
Thee have I not locked up in any chest,
Save where thou art not, though I feel thou art,
Within the gentle closure of my breast,
From whence at pleasure thou may'st come and
        part;
    And even thence thou wilt be stolen, I fear,
    For truth proves thievish for a prize so dear. (48)

Against that time, if ever that time come
When I shall see thee frown on my defects,
When as thy love hath cast his utmost sum,
Called to that audit by advised respects;
Against that time, when thou shalt strangely pass,
And scarcely greet me with that sun, thine eye,
When love, converted from the thing it was,
Shall reasons find of settled gravity;
Against that time do I ensconce me here
Within the know ledge of mine own desert,
And this my hand against myself uprear,
To guard the lawful reasons on thy part:
    To leave poor me thou hast the strength of
           laws,
    Since, why to love, I can allege no cause. (49)



How heavy do I journey on the way,
When what I seek—my weary travel's end—
Doth teach that ease and that repose to say
"Thus far the miles are measured from thy friend!" [46]
The beast that bears me, lived with my woe,
Plods dully on, to bear that weight in me,
As if by some instinct the wretch did know
His rider loved not speed being made from
        thee:
The bloody spur cannot provoke him on
That sometimes anger thrusts into his hide
Which heavily he answers with a groan
Move sharp to me than spurring to his side:
    For that same groan doth put this in my
            mind;
    My grief lies onward, and my joy behind. (50)

Thus can my love excuse the slow offence
Of my dull bearer, when from thee I speed;
From where thou art why should I haste me thence?
Till I return, of posting is no need:
O, what excuse will my poor beast then find,
When swift extremity can seem but slow?
Then should I spur though mounted on the wind;
In wingèd speed no motion shall I know:
Then can no horse with my desire keep pace;
Therefore Desire, of perfect'st love being made,
Shall neigh no dull flesh in his fiery race,            [47]
But, love, for love, shall thus excuse in jade—
    Since from thee going he went wilful slow,
    Towards thee I'll run, and give him leave to go. (51)

So am I as the rich whose blessèd key
Can bring him to his sweet, unlockèd treasure,
The which he will not every hour survey,
For blunting the fine point of seldom pleasure:
Therefore are feasts so solemn and so rare:
Since, seldom coming in the long year set
Like stones of worth they thinly placèd are,
Or captain jewels in the carcanet:
So is the time that keeps you as my chest,
Or as the wardrobe which the robe doth hide,
To make some special instant special blest,
By new unfolding his imprisoned pride:
    Blessèd are you whose worthiness gives scope,
    Being had—to triumph; being lacked—to
            hope! (52)

Sweet love, renew thy force; be it not said,
Thy edge should blunter be than appetite,
Which but to-day by feeding is allayed,
To-morrow sharpened in his former might:
So love be thou; although to-day thou fill
Thy hungry eyes e'en till they wink with fulness,
To-morrow see again, and do not kill
The spirit of love with a perpetual dulness:
Let this sad interim, like the ocean be                    [48]
Which parts the shore, where two contracted new
Come daily to the banks, that, when they see
Return, of love, more bless'd may be the view:
    Or call it winter, which, being fall of care,
    Makes summer's welcome thrice more wished,
            more rare. (56)

The speaker in these Sonnets is the same as in Sonnet 29, where he was an outcast out of favour, out of luck, and out of heart, because in "disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes;" a bankrupt in most things, but rich in the possession of his lady's love.   Southampton is in disgrace at Court, from whatsoever cause, and there is a compulsory parting from his mistress.  The lovers must be twain, although they are undivided in their love.  There is a separating spite betwixt them.  This is the primary cause of his banishment, although he himself is much to blame.  The more immediate cause is something he has done, for which he holds himself solely guilty. This parting will not change their feeling toward each other, though it will steal sweet hours from their delight by the enforced absence.  He may not call her his any more, lest the guilt which he bewails should shame her, nor must she notice him for others to see; must not show him any kindness publicly or in presence of the Court, else it will be to her own dishonour.  He loves her so that her good report is his, and rather than endanger it further, he accepts the parting as being necessary for her sake.  In this way those blots that remain with him shall be borne by him alone, without her having to share the burden of his blame.  The outcast condition is continued in Sonnet 37.  The speaker is "made lame by Fortune's dearest spite," disgrace at Court has disabled him from service.  In this plight he takes all his comfort and delight in his lady's "worth and truth;" he lives by a part of all her glory, and in sharing her abundance is "sufficed;" possessing her he is no longer lame or poor or despised.  As in the previous Sonnets (29, 30, 31), she is looked up to as the crown of his life; the solace of his thoughts when parting from her, or when he is alone in exile.  On the journey, wearied with the daily march, he hastens to bed, but not to sleep.  He cannot rest for thinking of his beloved left behind. Another journey by night follows the travel by day to work his mind when his bodily toil is over.  His thoughts return upon a zealous pilgrimage to her; they go back from afar where he is staying—

How can he then return in "happy plight" to renew his travel, who has no benefit of rest?  Night shows her to him in vision; the day takes him farther and farther away from her.  He tells them stories of his love and of her loveliness, to wile away the time.  It is all in vain.  For the day still draws out the distance longer and longer, and the night doth nightly make stronger that length of grief drawn out by day.  He sees best when he shuts his eyes.  Her image in his mind shines with such splendour that it makes the night luminous and the day dark.  But how blessed would his eyes be made if he could but look on her real self in the living day instead of in the dead of night, when he thus sees her "imperfect shade."  Sonnet 61 is one of those that have gone astray, and is now restored to an appropriate place.  Is it her will, he asks, to keep his eyes open, his mind awake, to mock him with these shadows of herself?  Or does she send her spirit so far from home to pry into his deeds—

Oh, no! he says, it is not her love nor her jealousy, but his own, that keeps him awake and on the fret—

If mind and matter were but identical, he thinks how swiftly would he be brought from "limits far remote" to where she dwells.  But he is composed of the four elements, and cannot be all thought to "leap large lengths of miles" when her image has fled from his mental vision.  The dull and heavy elements of earth and water are too much for him, but he is with her in thought and in desire.  Those quicker elements, all air and fire, are the swift messengers that visit her in tender embassy of love.  These can go to her and return to tell him of her "fair health."  They give their messages to him and straightway does he send them back again to her.  Now the lover looks upon two different portraits of his lady.  He has one likeness of her at heart, the other he can doat on with his eyes and fondle in his clasp.  He is in possession of a real objective picture palpable to his visual sense—the "painted  banquet" of his "love's picture" which is still present for the eyes to feast on when the original is far away.  This alone will account for  the conflict between the eyes and the heart, and for the league of amity that followed by means of which the eyes would let the heart see their objective picture at one time, and the heart could show its inner likeness to the sight another, so that whether he wakes or sleeps, he can see her likeness still.  She is present  with him in the shape of her miniature—

We are also reminded of Sidney's lines—

Now occurs the very natural thought of his care on leaving home, in securing his jewels and locking up his trifles; and he has left this precious jewel of his love exposed as the unprotected prey of any common thief.  Her he could not lock up, except in his heart.  He fears she will be stolen from him, as the

"Truth proves thievish for a prize so dear."

Then he reverts to the reasons of his banishment, speaks of his defects, his unworthiness of her, and confesses that if she ever should determine to leave him he can allege no cause why she should continue to love him.  When going away from his beloved, he journeys heavily on the road; the horse bears him slowly, as if it were conscious that his rider was in no haste, and it felt the weight of his woe.  Thus, thinking of his grief that lies before and his joy behind, he can excuse the slow pace of his steed.  But if he were returning to his beloved, what excuse could his horse then find?

He would come back on wings of desire; no horse could keep pace with him.  His horse, Desire, should neigh, that is, salute, no dull flesh in his fiery race, as his horse is in the habit of doing whilst trooping in company with other horses.  Then he tries to give an ingenious turn to the enforced absence.  He makes it look as though he had a choice in the matter, and the separation was only to put a finer point upon the pleasure of meeting.  He is rich in a locked-up possession, of which he keeps the key; but he will not look in upon his treasure too often, lest it should dull his sense of the preciousness, make the privilege too common.  The "time that keeps" the beloved is his "chest," or jewel-casket; or rather it is the wardrobe that hides the robe which is to make blest some special moment by a fresh unfolding of the shut-up richness, his imprisoned pride

In Sonnet 56 the poet dramatizes the return home, and makes an appeal for the return of love.  We see the meeting of the affianced pair, the two who were compelled to be twain at parting are now "contracted new"; the lapse of time during the absence being recognized as a "sad interim"—the Winter that is now to be followed by the Summer of love's smile.

    The autobiographic reading of these Sonnets pre-supposes Shakspeare to be the speaker; Shakspeare who is so deeply in disgrace that it is a matter of necessity for his friend to "cut" him altogether.  He must not acknowledge our Poet as his companion any more; must not take any further notice of him, or show him any public kindness whatsoever, lest the personal guilt which the speaker bewails should bring his friend to dishonour and cover him with shame.  So bad a case was it that we have to suppose it necessary for the Poet to go abroad and get disinfected in foreign air.  There are no grounds for thinking that Shakspeare ever undertook a long journey like this; no reason to believe that he was ever out of England, unless he went to Scotland when his Theatrical Company was on a visit to the Northern Court.  Even then the only journey known to have been made by the players to the Scottish capital was too late to be referred to in Sonnets that were extant in 1598.

    Here is a man who is certainly a lover on his travels, performing a long and wearisome journey on horseback day by day.  He plods on farther and farther away from the person addressed and adored.  In Sonnet 27 he is so far away that he can speak of his thoughts making a pilgrimage home again.  If he could be all spirit, and move swift as thought, then the great and perilous distance that lies between them should not stop him.  In spite of space, he would come from the distant shores, "limits far remote," to the place where his beloved stays!  It was a journey also for which considerable preparations had to be made.  Long time of absence was contemplated, and the speaker's personal property placed in sure wards of trust, as it was customary to deposit jewels and other treasures in some banker's safe.  So Bertram in All's Well, when starting on his journey says—

"I have writ my letters; casketed my treasure."

But it may be assumed that Shakspeare's personal jewels at the time of writing were hardly worth mentioning in this comparison with a nobleman!  Besides, the voyage was on account of a compulsory banishment.  The absence was enforced.  The speaker says—

"I must attend Time's leisure with my moan."

It has been assumed, as Brown suggested, that Shakspeare may have written thus of his journey and his jewels, the "large length of miles," the "limits far remote," the "sea and land," that lay between him and the friend who might be filched from him in his absence, when he ventured to make his long and perilous journey to Stratford.  Thus Shakspeare on his way home to visit his wife and dear little ones must be supposed not only to bewail the parting from his "Best of Dearest" and his "Only Care," but also to assert that his "Grief lies Onward" and his "joy behind."  A clear confession that he had trouble with Anne, and was unhappy in his married lot!  This is the sort of evidence they rely on to prove it. And then to think of his poor deserted friend Southampton, whom he has left at large in London, not locked up in any chest or banker's strong box—left him all unprotected to become the "prey of every vulgar thief!"  It would be heartrending indeed!  One of my critics objected to Southampton being mounted on a "jade," a hack, and thought it far more fitted for Shakspeare on his way to Stratford; not perceiving that this is an instance of the "Pathetic fallacy," and that the horse is "jaded" by the rider's feeling.

    King Richard II. says of his pet roan Barbary,

"The jade hath ate bread from my royal hand,"

and of himself—

It is only intellectual eunuchs who could imagine that men ever dream of one another in the night-season, and fear lest their mate may be stolen, and write of their jealousy by day in this fashion! The Sonnets tell us that this traveller by land and sea, this wanderer abroad, was not Shakspeare, whose work it was to stay at home all the time and write about his friend.  It was this absence that taught the Poet

    He could not speak more plainly for himself.  His mode of praising or writing about his friend was to express the thoughts and feelings, the day-dreams and visions of the night, the heart-yearnings and jealous fears of a lover, in the lover's own language and imagery of love.  "Myself have played the interim," says the chorus in King Henry V., V.; and this was exactly what Shakspeare had done for the pair of ill-starred lovers—he had "played the interim," and filled in all he could with the aid of vicarious or Dramatic Sonnets.

    Without comprehending the purpose and object, we may say the sex, of Sonnets like these, it was impossible to perceive their full significance.  It was like seeing only the beauty of the flower in form and colour, without being able to smell its sweetness.

    The comparative test will afford some evidence that it is a woman who is addressed by her lover in this group of Sonnets.  In the lines—

the Poet was reversely applying the marriage text of Matthew (xix. 6), "They are no more twain, but one flesh," which affords good evidence in favour of the two sexes, and is an obvious reminder of the joining together that was not to be put asunder.  So Pandarus, speaking to Helen of Cressid and Paris, says, "She'll none of him; they two are twain," which also applies to both sexes.  So in the old ballad of Clerk Saunders—

"It were great sin true love to twain."

Further, the comparative test applied to these Sonnets and to the play of Romeo and Juliet will likewise show us that it is a lover who addresses his mistress in both.  Romeo says of Juliet—

And the lover in the Sonnets had said—                 

Again, Romeo says,

This is curiously turned from the Sonnets where the eyes of the lover see the image of his lady in a dream, and he says—

This is Shakspeare's own testimony in his drama to the nature of his imagery and the sex of the characters in the Sonnets.  The comparison with Sidney's Sonnets addressed to Stella also tends to show that the same likenesses were applied by Shakspeare to a woman, and not to a man, in his Sonnets.  The language, the images, the feelings, the Plays, the example of Sidney, the situations, all point to the female sex.  Sidney is not only followed, he is also borrowed from.

The following Sonnet should be especially compared with Shakspeare's (No. 50—51)—

    Here, as elsewhere, it is an intensely interesting study to watch Shakspeare at work.  In his selection of material only the fittest survives.  It is curious to note what he did take, but still more instructive to observe that which he left behind.  Sidney turns his desire into a horse, and then identifies himself with the horse; he becomes "a horse to love."  In Shakspeare's Sonnets Desire is identified with the horse—a horse that does not neigh; but he does not repeat the direct comparison, and so avoids that element—something between a naïveté and niaiserie—which is natural to Sidney, but too unripe for Shakspeare.

    It is the horse in Sidney's Sonnet that enables us to understand the imagery of Shakspeare's, which has perplexed commentators, concerning the Desire that is not to neigh like a horse.  Another difficulty may be cleared up with the aid of Sidney.  He says of his Star (Stella) that it "not only shines, but sings" (p. 140).  Sidney listens in spirit to the star that in its motion seems to sing.  This magnificent image is converted by Shakspeare into a sparkling star that twires, or reversely,

"When sparkling stars twire not."—Sonnet 28.

which expression has bequeathed to us one of the critical cruxes of the Sonnets.

    Twiring is equivalent to quiring, or singing.  Skinner says "twyreth is interpreted singeth."  This sense is extant in Chaucer, who uses it for the intermittent sounds of a bird.  Beaumont and Fletcher have applied it to the braying of an ass—"You are an ass, a twire-pipe."  Twire is also employed for visible motion as well as audible.  In both senses, or to both senses, it is a quivering, hence the application to a star that sings as well as shines.  This treatment of Sidney's image gives us an enlightening glimpse of Shakspeare's art of fusing two things into a third, or two meanings into one word.  For a moment we seem to fathom the secret of his magic by such a revealing flash.  Lastly, the comparative process shows us for residual result that the writer does not derive those incidents and events from Sidney which go to make up the story of Southampton's Sonnets.  In these Shakspeare is drawing directly from the life, the love, the character, the personal history of his friend, and no genuine lover of poetry can fail to feel how these Sonnets dilate with life when spoken by a lover who is far away from his mistress.  Thus interpreted, they are profoundly beautiful; the beauty reaching its best in Sonnets 48 and 52.  How much nearer to nature they nestle when we know the yearnings are womanward.  This gives to them the true bitter-sweet.  How tender and true and naïvely winsome is the expression!  How deep-hearted the love!  The dramatic mood shows the Poet to us likest himself; the poetry kindles with a new dawn, and breathes the aroma of Shakspeare's sweetest love-lines; it takes us into a presence akin to that of Perdita and Viola, Helena, Juliet, Imogen, and the rest of those fragrant-natured women whom he "loved into being;" and this veiled presence which has so perplexed us, when told that all these tender perfections of poetry, caresses of feeling, and daintinesses of expression were lavished on a man, and the natural instinct fought against the seeming fact, is the presence of Mistress Elizabeth Vernon, with whom Southampton was in love, and from whom he was parted by a "separating spite."

    It was in May 1595 that, according to Mr. Standen, the Earl of Southampton had got into disgrace at Court, and that Elizabeth Vernon and her ill good man waited upon her irate Majesty to know her resolution in the matter.  Her Majesty sent out word to say firmly that she was sufficiently resolved.  In September of the same year, White tells us that the Earl of Southampton has been courting the fair Mistress Vernon with too much familiarity; the meaning of which is too plain for the need of comment.  The Queen's resolve was, without , doubt, that Southampton should quit the Court in consequence, which was followed by his leaving England for a time.  Hence the "separating spite."  Hence the Sonnets spoken by Southampton during his absence, with which Shakspeare did "entertain the time with thoughts of love," and so played the part of Viola, who says to Olivia, "I did woo you in my master's flame."

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Footnotes.

[34.](page 113)   Leopold Shakspeare, Introd., D. 65.

[35.](page 121)   Grosart, 49.

[36.](page 123)   Howard's Collection, p. 521.

[37.](page 131)   "Let not women's weapons, water-drops
                                 Stain my man's cheeks."—Lear, II. iv.

[38.](page 135)   I adopt Dr. Nicholson's suggestion, quoted by Dr. Grosart, p.187, v.2, Sidney's Poems (Fuller's Worthies Library) to the effect that the name of Barley-Break is derived from Bar-Law, the exclamation of "Barley" meaning beyond reach of the law, or exempted from the penalty.

[39.](page 135)   10, 225-238, p.36, v. 2, Grosart.

[40.](page 140)

[41.](page 140)

[42.](page 140)   i.e. I would be brought from "limits far remote" where I am, on distant shores, to where then dost stay, at home.

[43.](page 140)   So in King John—

                "Large lengths of seas and shores
Between my father and my mother lay."

[44.](page 141)  Sonnets 46 and 47 are obviously based on one of Drayton's that was printed in 1594; which agrees with the most probable date for the group. The difference turns upon the possession of an actual picture, and on the use of legal terminology.

[45.](page 141)   "My jewels." So Bertram, in All's Well that Ends Well, while preparing for a journey, says—

"I have writ my letters, casketed my treasure,"

[46.](page 141)   So Bolingbroke when going into banishment, says— 

[47.] (page 142)   The image is used by one who rides a horse among horses, and horses are in the habit of neighing when they salute each other; they will do this, too, if speed be ever so important. And the writer says, his desire being made of perfectest love, having nothing animal about it, shall not salute any dull flesh in his fiery race; only he continues the use of the image by means of the word "neigh."  Perhaps the Poet was thinking of the words of the prophet Jeremiah—"They were as fed horses in the morning: every one neighed after his neighbour's wife."

[48.](page 142)   Interim, printed in italics in the quarto.