[From Mr. F. J. Furnivall's Comments on the Sonnets.*] The great question is, do Shakspere's Sonnets speak his own heart and thoughts or not? And were it not for the fact that many critics really deserving the name of Shakspere students, and not Shakspere fools, have held the Sonnets to be merely dramatic, I could not have conceived that poems so intensely and evidently autobiographic and selfrevealing, poems so one with the spirit and inner meaning of Shakspere's growth and life, could ever have been conceived to be other than what they are, the records of his own loves and fears. And I believe that if the acceptance of them as such had not involved the consequence of Shakspere's intrigue with a married woman, all readers would have taken the Sonnets as speaking of Shakspere's own life. But his admirers are so anxious to remove every stain from him that they contend for a non-natural interpretation of his poems. . . . They forget Shakspere's impulsive nature, and his long absence from his home. They will not face the probabilities of the case, or recollect that David was still God's friend though Bathsheba lived. The Sonnets are, in one sense, Shakspere's Psalms. Spiritual struggles underlie both poets' work. For myself, I 'd accept any number of "slips in sensual mire" on Shakspere's part, to have the "bursts of (loving) heart" given us in the Sonnets. The true motto for the first group of Shakspere's Sonnets is to be seen in David's words, "I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan ; very pleasant hast thou been unto me. Thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of woman." We have had them reproduced for us Victorians, without their stain of sin and shame, in Mr. Tennyson's In Memoriam. We have had them again to some extent in Mrs. Browning's glorious Sonnets to her husband, with their iterance, “Say over again, and yet once over again, that thou *The Leopold Shakspere (London, 1877), p. lxiii. fol. dost love me." We may look upon the Sonnets as a piece of music, or as Shakspere's pathetic sonata, each melody introduced, dropped again, brought in again with variations, but one full strain of undying love and friendship through the whole. Why could Shakspere say so beautifully for Antonio of The Merchant, "All debts are cleared between you and I, if I might but see you at my death: notwithstanding, use your pleasure"? Why did he make Antonio of Twelfth Night say, "A witchcraft drew me hither"? Why did he make Viola declare— "And I most jocund, apt, and willingly, To do you rest, a thousand deaths would die "? Why did he paint Helena alone; saying— "T was pretty though a plague To see him every hour; to sit and draw But now he's gone, and my idolatrous fancy Because he himself was Helena, Antonio. A witchcraft drew him to a "boy," a youth to whom he gave his "Love without pretension or restraint, All his in dedication." Shakspere towards him was as Viola towards the Duke. went "After him I love more than I love these eyes, More than my life." He In the Sonnets we have the gentle Will, the melancholy mildeyed man, of the Droeshout portrait. Shakspere's tender, sensitive, refined nature is seen clearly here, but through a glass darkly in the plays. I have no space to dwell on the sections into which I separate the Sonnets, and which follow in the table below. I will only call special attention to sections 9 and 11 (Nos. 71-74, 87-93), in which Shakspere's love to his friend is so beautifully set forth, and to section 13 (Nos. 97-99), in which Will's flower-like beauty is dwelt on, as Shakspere's love for him in absence recalled it. Let those who want to realize the difference between one kind of friendship and another, contrast these Sonnets of Shakspere's with Bacon's celebrated Essay on Friendship. On this point I quote the first page of a paper sent in to me at my Bedford Lectures: "There are some men who love for the sake of what love yields, and of these was Lord Bacon; and there are some who love for 'love's sake,' and loving once, love always; and of these was Shakspere. These do not lightly give their love, but once given, their faith is incorporate with their being; and having become part of themselves, to part with that part would be to be dismembered. Therefore if change or sin corrupt the engrafted limb, the only effect is that the whole body is shaken with anguish, 'And yet, love knows, it is a greater grief To bear love's wrongs, than hate's known injury.'-Sonn. 40. The offending member may be nursed into health, or loved into life again; but-forsaken!-never! 'Love is not love, Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove.'-Sonn. 116. These are not the men who reap outer advantage from their friendship; they generally give rather than take; they are often the victims of circumstance, and the scapegoats for their friends' offences; still, they reap the benefit which inward growth produces; the glorious leaven of self-abnegating love within them impregnates their whole being; they move simply and naturally among us, but we feel that they stand on a higher level than we-that they see with 'larger, other eyes than ours,' and we yield them homage, and feel better for having known them.”—M. J. The thoughtless objection that many Sonnets in this group confuse the sex of the person they 're addressed to, is so plainly answered by Shakspere himself in Sonnet 20, on the mastermistress of his passion, that one can only wonder-although a Shakspere student is bound to wonder at nothing in his commentators that the objection was ever taken. SONNETS. ANALYSIS OF GROUP I. SONNETS I-126. Section 1. Sonnets 1-26. a. 1-17. Will's beauty, and his duty to marry and beget a son. 66 3. 4. ம் 5. 6. 66 66 66 8. 66 66 9. B. 18-26. Will's beauty, and Shakspere's love for him. 27-32. First Absence. Shakespere travelling, and away from Will. 33-35. Will's sensual fault blamed, repented, and for given. 36-39. Shakspere has committed a fault that will sep- 40-42. Will has taken away Shakspere's mistress. B. 57-58. The sovereign: slave watching: so y. 59-60. Will's beauty. d. 61. Waking and watching. Shakspere has rivals. 62 65. Shakspere full of self-love, conquered by Time, which will conquer Will too: yet Shakspere will secure him eternity. 66-70. Shakspere (like Hamlet) tired of the world: but not only on public grounds. Will has. mixed with bad company; but Shakspere is sure he is pure, and excuses him. 71-74. Shakspere on his own death, and his entire love for his friend. (Compare the death-thoughts in Hamlet and Measure for Measure.*) * I do not think that "The coward conquest of a wretch's knife," 74, 11, alludes to an attempt to stab Shakspere. I believe it is the " Сеп founding age's cruel knife" of 63. 10. Section 10. Sonnets 75-77. Shakspere's love, and always writing on one theme, his Will; with the present of a table-book, dial, and pocket looking-glass combined in one. 78-93. a. 78-86. Shakspere on his rivals in Will's love. (G. Chapman, the rival poet.*) B. 87-93. Shakspere's farewell to Will: most beautiful in the self-forgetfulness of Shakspere's love. 97-99. Third Absence. Will's flower-like beauty, and Shakspere's love for him; followed by faults on both sides, and a separation,† ended by Will's desire, 120. II. * "The proud full sail of his great verse " (86. 1) probably alludes to the swelling hexameters of Chapman's englishing of Homer. "His spirit, by spirits taught to write," may well refer to Chapman's claim that Homer's spirit inspired him, a claim made, no doubt, in words, before its appearance in print in his Tears of Peace, 1609, Inductio, p. 112, col. i., Chatto and Windus ed. "I am, said he [Homer], that spirit Elysian, That With such a flood of soul, that thou wert fain, To vent it to the echoes of the vale and thou didst inherit My true sense, for the time then, in my spirit; See, too, on Shakspere's sneer at his rival's "affable familiar ghost, which nightly gulls him with intelligence," Chapman's Dedication to his Shadow of Night (1594), p. 3, "not without having drops of their souls like an awaked familiar," and in his Tears of Peace, p. 123, col. 2: "Still being persuaded by the shameless night, That all my reading, writing, all my pains, Are serious trifles, and the idle veins Of an unthrifty angel that deludes My simple fancy." These make a better case for Chapman being the rival than has been made for any one else. (Mr. Harold Littledale gave me some of these references.) † Happily not ending like that of Sir Leoline and Lord Roland de Vaux, in Coleridge. |