66

his priuate friends." This was in 1598, and in the next year two of them (138 and 144) were printed in The Passionate Pilgrim. We do not know that any of the others were published before 1609. They were probably written at intervals during many years. Some, if we were to judge by their style, belong to the time when Romeo and Juliet was written. Others-as, for example, 66-74-echo the sadder tone which is heard in Hamlet and Measure for Measure" (Dowden). It is evident that there is a gap of at least three years (see 104) between 99 and the following group (100-112).

The theories concerning these interesting poems cannot even be enumerated in the space at our command. "Some have looked on them as one poem; some as several poems— of groups of sonnets; some as containing a separate poem in each sonnet. They have been supposed to be written in Shakespeare's own person, or in the character of another, or of several others; to be autobiographical or heterobiographical, or allegorical; to have been addressed to Lord Southampton, to Sir William Herbert, to his own wife, to Lady Rich, to his child, to his nephew, to himself, to his muse. The 'W. H.' in the dedication has been interpreted as William Herbert, William Hughes, William Hathaway, William Hart (his nephew), William Himself, and Henry Wriothesly" (Fleay).*

For our own part, we find it as difficult to believe that some of the Sonnets are autobiographical as that others are not; and all that has been written to prove that 1-126 are all addressed to the same person fails to convince us. It is clear enough that certain sets (like 1-17, for instance)

* Some of these theories are discussed in the extracts given below from Dowden's Introduction to his valuable edition of the Sonnets. For an admirable résumé of the entire literature of the subject, see the larger edition of Dowden (London, 1881), Part II. of the Introduction, pp. 36-110.

form a regular series, but that all the poems are arranged in the order in which Shakespeare meant to have them is not so clear. There is no evidence that the edition of 1609 was supervised or even authorized by him. The enigmatical dedication is not his, but the publisher's; and the arrangement of the poems is probably that of the person who procured them for publication, whoever he may have been. The order seems to us more like that of a collector-one who knew something of their history, and was interested in getting them together for publication-than that of the author. Possibly this collector had his own little theory as to the interconnection of some of them, like certain of the modern editors, no one of whom seems on the whole to have been any more successful in classifying them. We fear that both their order and the means by which the publisher got possession of them must continue to be among the insoluble problems of literature.*

II. CRITICAL COMMENTS ON THE SONNETS.

[From Dowden's Edition.]

The student of Shakspere is drawn to the Sonnets not alone by their ardour and depth of feeling, their fertility and condensation of thought, their exquisite felicities of phrase, and their frequent beauty of rhythmical movement, but in a peculiar degree by the possibility that here, if nowhere else, the greatest of English poets may—as Wordsworth puts it— have "unlocked his heart." It were strange if his silence, *See also Addenda, p. 184 fol. below.

The Sonnets of William Shakspere, edited by Edward Dowden (London, 1881), p. xv. fol. (also in the larger ed. p. 4 fol.).

Poets differ in the interpretation of the Sonnets as widely as critics: "With this same key

Shakespeare unlocked his heart' once more!

Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he !"

So, Mr. Browning; to whom replies Mr. Swinburne, "No whit the less like Shakespeare, but undoubtedly the less like Browning." Some of

deep as that of the secrets of Nature, never once knew interruption. The moment, however, we regard the Sonnets as autobiographical, we find ourselves in the presence of doubts and difficulties, exaggerated, it is true, by many writers, yet certainly real.

If we must escape from them, the simplest mode is to assume that the Sonnets are "the free outcome of a poetic imagination" (Delius). It is an ingenious suggestion of Delius that certain groups may be offsets from other poetical works of Shakspere; those urging a beautiful youth to perpetuate his beauty in offspring may be a derivative from Venus and Adonis; those declaring love for a dark complexioned woman may rehandle the theme set forth in Berowne's passion for the dark Rosaline of Love's Labour's Lost; those which tell of a mistress resigned to a friend may be a nondramatic treatment of the theme of love and friendship presented in the later scenes of The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Perhaps a few sonnets, as 110 and 111, refer to circumstances of Shakspere's life (Dyce); the main body of these poems may still be regarded as mere exercises of the fancy.

Such an explanation of the Sonnets has the merit of simplicity; it unties no knots, but cuts all at a blow; if the collection consists of disconnected exercises of the fancy, we Shelley's feeling with reference to the Sonnets may be guessed from certain lines to be found among the Studies for Epipsychidion and Cancelled Passages (Poetical Works: ed. Forman, vol. ii. pp. 392, 393), to which my attention has been called by Mr. E. W. Gosse:

"If any should be curious to discover
Whether to you I am a friend or lover,

Let them read Shakspeare's sonnets, taking thence

A whetstone for their dull intelligence

That tears and will not cut, or let them guess
How Diotima, the wise prophetess,

Instructed the instructor, and why he
Rebuked the infant spirit of melody

On Agathon's sweet lips, which as he spoke
Was as the lovely star when morn has broke
The roof of darkness, in the golden dawn,
Half-hidden and yet beautiful."

need not try to reconcile discrepancies, nor shape a story, nor ascertain a chronology, nor identify persons. And what indeed was a sonneteer's passion but a painted fire? What was the form of verse but an exotic curiously trained and tended, in which an artificial sentiment imported from Italy gave perfume and colour to the flower?

And yet, in this as in other forms, the poetry of the time, which possesses an enduring vitality, was not commonly caught out of the air, but-however large the conventional element in it may have been was born of the union of heart and imagination; in it real feelings and real experience, submitting to the poetical fashions of the day, were raised to an ideal expression. Spenser wooed and wedded the Elizabeth of his Amoretti. The Astrophel and Stella tells of a veritable tragedy, fatal perhaps to two bright lives and passionate hearts. And what poems of Drummond do we remember as we remember those which record how he loved and lamented Mary Cunningham ?

Some students of the Sonnets, who refuse to trace their origin to real incidents of Shakspere's life, allow that they form a connected poem, or at most two connected poems, and these, they assure us, are of deeper significance than any mere poetical exercises can be. They form a stupendous allegory; they express a profound philosophy. The young friend whom Shakspere addresses is in truth the poet's Ideal Self, or Ideal Manhood, or the Spirit of Beauty, or the Reason, or the Divine Logos; his dark mistress, whom a prosaic German translator (Jordan) takes for a mulatto or quadroon, is indeed Dramatic Art, or the Catholic Church, or the Bride of the Canticles, black but comely. Let us not smile too soon at the pranks of Puck among the critics; it is more prudent to move apart and feel gently whether that sleek nole, with fair large ears, may not have been slipped upon our own shoulders.

When we question saner critics why Shakspere's Sonnets

may not be at once Dichtung und Wahrheit, poetry and truth, their answer amounts to this: Is it likely that Shakspere would so have rendered extravagant homage to a boy patron? Is it likely that one who so deeply felt the moral order of the world would have yielded, as the poems to his dark lady acknowledge, to a vulgar temptation of the senses? or, yielding, would have told his shame in verse? Objections are brought forward against identifying the youth of the Sonnets with Southampton or with Pembroke; it is pointed out that the writer speaks of himself as old, and that in a sonnet published in Shakspere's thirty-fifth year; here evidently he cannot have spoken in his own person, and if not here, why elsewhere? Finally, it is asserted that the poems lack internal harmony; no real person can be—what Shakspere's friend is described as being-true and false, constant and fickle, virtuous and vicious, of hopeful expectation, and publicly blamed for careless living.

Shakspere speaks of himself as old; true, but in the sonnet published in The Passionate Pilgrim (138), he speaks as a lover, contrasting himself, skilled in the lore of life, with an inexperienced youth; doubtless at thirty-five he was not a Florizel nor a Ferdinand. In the poems to his friend, Shakspere is addressing a young man perhaps of twenty years, in the fresh bloom of beauty; he celebrates with delight the floral grace of youth, to which the first touch of time will be a taint; those lines of thought and care, which his own mirror shows, bear witness to time's ravage. It is as a poet that Shakspere writes, and his statistics are those not of arithmetic but of poetry.

That he should have given admiration and love without measure to a youth highborn, brilliant, accomplished, who singled out the player for peculiar favour, will seem wonderful only to those who keep a constant guard upon their affections, and to those who have no need to keep a guard at all. In the Renascence epoch, among natural products of