Hegel said that the great characters of Shakespeare are “free artists of themselves” engaged in fresh and perpetual self-invention; they are surprised by their own genius, just as Shakespeare was surprised when the words of Falstaff issued from his pen. He did not know where the words came from; he just knew that they came. It has become unfashionable in recent years to discuss Shakespeare’s characters as if they somehow had an independent existence, outside the boundaries of the play; but it was not unfashionable at the time. Falstaff and his comic colleagues proved so successful that they were brought back by Shakespeare, for an encore, in The Merry Wives of Windsor.
There is perhaps a further connection between Falstaff and Shakespeare. The relation of the fat knight to Prince Hal has often been taken as a comic version of the relationship between Shakespeare and the “young man” of the sonnets in which infatuation is succeeded by betrayal. The twin “act” of older and younger man in that sonnet sequence has also been related to Shakespeare’s longing for his dead son. These were some of the forces in his life that, in this period, propelled him towards a supreme poetic achievement.
CHAPTER 52
You Haue Not the Booke of
Riddles About You. Haue You?
Are Shake-speares Sonnets authentic representations of Shakespeare’s inner experience, or are they exercises in the dramatic art? Or do they exist in some ambiguous world where both art and experience cannot be distinguished? Could they have begun as testimonies to real people and real actions, and then slowly changed into a poetic performance to be judged on its own terms?
There were many models for their composition. Shakespeare was entering a crowded arena where poets and poetasters regularly published sequences of sonnets to various real or unreal recipients. The unofficial publication of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, in 1591, was an indication of the demand for such works; the pirated edition was withdrawn but in its preface the sonnets were described by Nashe as “a paper stage strewed with pearl … whiles the tragicomedy of love is performed by starlight.” 1 This suggests the overwhelming theatricality or artificiality of the genre, for which the expression of private passion was by no means a necessary condition. They were primarily designed to display the wit and ingenuity of the poet, and to test his ability in handling delicate metres or sustained conceits. The publication of Sidney’s collection was followed by Samuel Daniel’s Delia, Barnaby Barnes’s Parthenophil and Parthenophe, William Percy’s Coelia, Drayton’s collection of fifty sonnets entitled Idea’s Mirror, Bartholomew Griffin’s Fidessa, Henry Constable’s Diana and a host of other imitators. Sonneteering had become the English literary fashion.
Many of these sonneteers characteristically make use of legal imagery in the course of their poetical love-making. This may perhaps be part of their vocabulary as members of the various Inns of Court, but it suggests some instinctive doubling of law and love in sixteenth-century England. Shakespeare’s own sonnets are filled with the language and imagery of the law. But his mercantile and legalistic mind is at odds with his generous muse, just as his plays often stage the contention of faith and scepticism; from that strife emerges his greatness.
Of course he may not have wanted his sonnets to be printed; there was, after all, an interval of approximately fifteen years between composition and publication. Like Fulke Greville, whose sonnet sequence Caelica languished in a drawer, he may have considered them to be private exercises for a select audience. But this does not imply that they are accounts of an authentic passion; Fulke Greville’s poems are governed by a literary rather than a real mistress.
One sonneteer, Giles Fletcher, admitted that he had embarked upon the poetic enterprise, “only to try my humour”;2 that may also be the explanation for Shakespeare’s performance. There is evidence that throughout his career he was inclined to experiment with different forms of literature simply to prove that he could successfully adapt them to his purposes; there was a strong streak of competitiveness in his nature, already manifested in his overreaching of Marlowe and of Kyd, and the sonnet had in this period become the paramount test of poetic ability. So Shakespeare used many of the stock themes — the beauty of the beloved, the cruelty of the beloved, the wish to confer upon him or her the immortality of great verse, the pretence of age in the poet, and so on — and gave them a dramatic emphasis while at the same time handling the form of the sonnet superbly well. He sat down and wrote the best sonnets of all.
The first of them are overtly addressed to a young man, who is encouraged to marry and to breed so that his beauteous image may persist in the world. There has been endless speculation about the recipient of this loving advice, and for many biographers the palm must be awarded to the Earl of Southampton. He had refused to marry Lady Elizabeth deVere, granddaughter of Lord Burghley, and that is supposed to be the occasion for the early sonnets — commissioned, so it is said, by his irate mother. But this imbroglio occurred in 1591, an early date for the composition of the sonnets, and by the more likely date of 1595 Southampton had begun a notorious liaison with Elizabeth Vernon.
A more appropriate candidate appears to be William Herbert, the future Earl of Pembroke. In 1595, at the age of fifteen, he was being urged by his immediate family to marry the daughter of Sir George Carey; but he refused to do so. This might have been the spur for Shakespeare’s early sonnets. Since William Herbert’s father was the patron of the company for which Shakespeare acted and wrote plays, it would have been natural for him to ask Shakespeare to provide some poetical persuasion. The poems, alternatively, may have been written at the instigation of William Herbert’s mother, the illustrious Mary Herbert; she was the sister of Sir Philip Sidney, and the presiding spirit of a literary coterie in which Shakespeare played a part.
There was another fruitless marriage plan for William Herbert, concocted by his family in 1597, which could have provided a similar opportunity. But the reluctance of the fifteen-year-old Herbert seems a better context for Shakespeare’s advice. It may also help to clear up the confusion concerning the publisher’s later dedication to “Mr. WH.” Could this not be William Herbert, surreptitiously addressed? It would help to explain Ben Jonson’s cryptic dedication to Herbert on the publication of his Epigrammes in 1616, “when I made them, I had nothing in my conscience, to expressing of which I did need a cypher.”
William Herbert entered Shakespeare’s life at an opportune moment, but the connections between them can only be puzzled out of inference and speculation. The First Folio of Shakespeare’s works was dedicated to him, and to his brother, Philip, Earl of Montgomery, and in the course of that dedication the author is described to the Pembrokes as “your seruant, Shakespeare.” Of the plays, it is stated that the Pembroke brothers “haue prosequuted both them, and their Author liuing, with so much favour” and that “you will use the indulgence toward them, you have done vnto their parent.” There is also a reference to their lordships’ “liking of the seuerall parts, when they were acted.” This implies some deep reserve of affection, and respect, towards Shakespeare. It has sometimes been suggested that noblemen so eminent as the Pembroke brothers would not have formed any attachment for an actor and playwright, but that is not the case. William Herbert, in particular, was to lament the death of Richard Burbage in 1619 and to write from Whitehall to the Earl of Carlisle that “there was a great supper to the French Ambassador this night here, and even now all the Company are at the play, which I being tender-harted could not endure to see so soone after the loss of my old acquaintance Burbadg.”3 The loss of his other old acquaintance, William Shakespeare, three years before, had no doubt aroused similar sentiments.