Chapter V: Variorum editions of Shakespeare, 322 323 362 (4)

{407} Cf. _Sydney Papers_, ed. Collins, i. 353. 'My Lord (of Pembroke) himself with _my Lord Harbert_ (is) come up to see the Queen' (Rowland Whyte to Sir Robert Sydney, October 8, 1591), and again p. 361 (November 16, 1595); and p. 372 (December 5, 1595). John Chamberlain wrote to Sir Dudley Carleton on August 1, 1599, '_Young Lord Harbert_, Sir Henrie Carie, and Sir William Woodhouse, are all in election at Court, who shall set the best legge foremost.' _Chamberlain's Letters_ (Camden Soc.), p. 57

{408} Thomas Sackville, the author of the _Induction_ to_ The Mirror for Magistrates_ and other poetical pieces, and part author of _Gorboduc_, was born plain 'Thomas Sackville,' and was ordinarily addressed in youth as 'Mr. Sackville.' He wrote all his literary work while he bore that and no other designation. He subsequently abandoned literature for politics, and was knighted and created Lord Buckhurst. Very late in life, in 1604--at the age of sixty-eight--he became Earl of Dorset. A few of his youthful effusions, which bore his early signature, 'M. [_i.e._ Mr.] Sackville,' were reprinted with that signature unaltered in an encyclopaedic anthology, _England's Parnassus_, which was published, wholly independently of him, in 1600, after he had become Baron Buckhurst. About the same date he was similarly designated Thomas or Mr. Sackville in a reprint, unauthorised by him, of his _Induction_ to _The Mirror for Magistrates_, which was in the original text ascribed, with perfect correctness, to Thomas or Mr. Sackville. There is clearly no sort of parallel (as has been urged) between such an explicable, and not unwarrantable, metachronism and the misnaming of the Earl of Pembroke 'Mr. W. H.' As might be anticipated, persistent research affords no parallel for the latter irregularity.

{409} An examination of a copy of the book in the Bodleian--none is in the British Museum--shows that the dedication is signed J. H., and not, as Mr. Fleay infers, by Thorpe. Thorpe had no concern in this volume.

{410} On January 27, 1607-8, one Sir Henry Colte was indicted for slander in the Star Chamber for addressing a peer, Lord Morley, as 'goodman Morley.' A technical defect--the omission of the precise date of the alleged offence--in the bill of indictment led to a dismissal of the cause. See _Les Reportes del Cases in Camera Stellata_, 1593 to 1609, edited from the manuscript of Henry Hawarde by W. P. Baildon, F.S.A. (privately printed for Alfred Morrison), p. 348.

{411} See pp. 23, 231-2. A tradition has lately sprung up at Wilton to the effect that a letter once existed there in which the Countess of Pembroke bade her son the earl while he was in attendance on James I at Salisbury bring the King to Wilton to witness a performance of _As You Like It_. The countess is said to have added, 'We have the man Shakespeare with us.' No tangible evidence of the existence of the letter is forthcoming, and its tenor stamps it, if it exists, as an ignorant invention. The circumstances under which both King and players visited Wilton in 1603 are completely misrepresented. The Court temporarily occupied Wilton House, and Shakespeare and his comrades were ordered by the officers of the royal household to give a performance there in the same way as they would have been summoned to play before the King had he been at Whitehall. It is hardly necessary to add that the Countess of Pembroke's mode of referring to literary men is well known: she treated them on terms of equality, and could not in any aberration of mind or temper have referred to Shakespeare as 'the man Shakespeare.' Similarly, the present Earl of Pembroke purchased of a London picture-dealer last year what purported to be a portrait of the third Earl of Pembroke, and on the back was pasted a paper, that was represented to date from the seventeenth century, containing some lines from Shakespeare's Sonnet lxxxi. (9-14), subscribed with the words 'Shakespeare unto the Earl of Pembroke, 1603' The ink and handwriting are quite modern, and hardly make pretence to be of old date in the eyes of any one accustomed to study manuscripts. On May 5 of this year some persons interested in the matter, including myself, examined the portrait and the inscription, on the kind invitation of the present Earl, and the inscription was unanimously declared by palmographical experts to be a clumsy forgery unworthy of serious notice.

{414} Cf. the engravings of Simon Pass, Stent, and Vandervoerst, after the portrait by Mytens.

{415} It is unnecessary, after what has been said above (p. 123), to consider seriously the suggestion that the 'dark lady' of the sonnets was Mary Fitton, maid of honour to Queen Elizabeth. This frolicsome lady, who was at one time Pembroke's mistress and bore him a child, has been introduced into a discussion of the sonnets only on the assumption that her lover, Pembroke, was the youth to whom the sonnets were addressed. Lady Newdegate's recently published _Gossip from a Muniment Room_, which furnishes for the first time a connected biography of Pembroke's mistress, adequately disposes of any lingering hope that Shakespeare may have commemorated her in his black-complexioned heroine. Lady Newdegate states that two well-preserved portraits of Mary Fitton remain at Arbury, and that they reveal a lady of fair complexion with brown hair and grey eyes. Family history places the authenticity of the portraits beyond doubt, and the endeavour lately made by Mr. Tyler, the chief champion of the hopeless Fitton theory, to dispute their authenticity is satisfactorily met by Mr. C. O. Bridgeman in an appendix to the second edition of Lady Newdegate's book. We also learn from Lady Newdegate's volume that Miss Fitton, during her girlhood, was pestered by the attentions of a middle-aged admirer, a married friend of the family, Sir William Knollys. It has been lamely suggested by some of the supporters of the Pembroke theory that Sir William Knollys was one of the persons named Will who are alleged to be noticed as competitors with Shakespeare and the supposititious 'Will Herbert' for 'the dark lady's' favours in the sonnets (cxxxv., cxxxvi., and perhaps clxiii.) But that is a shot wholly out of range. The wording of those sonnets, when it is thoroughly tested, proves beyond reasonable doubt that the poet was the only lover named Will who is represented as courting the disdainful lady of the sonnets, and that no reference whatever is made there to any other person of that Christian name.

{416} Professor Dowden (_Sonnets_, p. xxxv) writes: 'It appears from the punning sonnets (cxxxv. and cxliii.) that the Christian name of Shakspere's friend was the same as his own, _Will_,' and thence is deduced the argument that the friend could only be identical with one who, like William Earl of Pembroke, bore that Christian name.

{418a} Ed. Mayor, p. 35.

{418b} Manningham's _Diary_, p. 92; cf. Barnabe Barnes's _Odes Pastoral_ sestine 2:

'But women will have their own wills,
Alas, why then should I complain?'

{419} Besides punning words, printers of poetry in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries made an effort to italicise proper names, unfamiliar words, and words deemed worthy of special emphasis. But they did not strictly adhere to these rules, and, while they often failed to italicise the words that deserved italicisation, they freely italicised others that did not merit it. Capital initial letters were employed with like irregularity. Mr. Wyndham in his careful note on the typography of the quarto of 1609 (pp. 259 seq.) suggests that Elizabethan printers were not erratic in their uses of italics or capital letters, but an examination of a very large number of Elizabethan and Jacobean books has brought me to an exactly opposite conclusion.

{420} Barnes's _Parthenophil_ in Arber's _Garner_, v. 440.

{421a} After quibbling in Sonnet lxxii. on the resemblance between the _graces_ of his cruel mistress's face and the _Graces_ of classical mythology, Barnes develops the topic in the next sonnet after this manner (the italics are my own):

Why did rich Nature _graces_ grant to thee,
Since thou art such a niggard of thy _grace_?
O how can _graces_ in thy body be?
Where neither they nor pity find a place! . . .
Grant me some _grace_! For thou with _grace_ art wealthy
And kindly may'st afford some _gracious_ thing.

{421b} Cf. _Lear_, IV. vi. 279, 'O undistinguish'd space of woman's will;' _i.e._ 'O boundless range of woman's lust.'

{421c} Professor Dowden says 'will to boot' is a reference to the Christian name of Shakespeare's friend, 'William [? Mr. W. H.]' (_Sonnets_, p. 236); but in my view the poet, in the second line of the sonnet, only seeks emphasis by repetition in accordance with no uncommon practice of his. The line 'And will to boot, and will in over-plus,' is paralleled in its general form and intention in such lines of other sonnets as

Kind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind (cv. 5).
Beyond all date, even to eternity (cxxii. 4).
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night (cxlvii. 14).

In all these instances the second half of the line merely repeats the first half with a slight intensification.

{422a} Cf. Barnes's Sonnet lxxiii.:

All her looks _gracious_, yet no _grace_ do bring
To me, poor wretch! Yet be the _Graces_ there.

{422b} Shakespeare refers to the blindness, the 'sightless view' of the soul, in Sonnet xxvii., and apostrophises the soul as the 'centre of his sinful earth' in Sonnet cxlvi.

{423a} The use of the word 'fulfil' in this and the next line should be compared with Barnes's introduction of the word in a like context in the passage given above:

Since what she lists her heart _fulfils_.

{423b} Mr. Tyler paraphrases these lines thus: 'You love your other admirer named Will. Love the name alone, and then you love me, for my name is Will,' p. 297. Professor Dowden, hardly more illuminating, says the lines mean: 'Love only my name (something less than loving myself), and then thou lovest me, for my name is Will, and I myself am all will, _i.e._ all desire.'

{425} The word 'Will' is not here italicised in the original edition of Shakespeare's sonnets, and there is no ground whatever for detecting in it any sort of pun. The line resembles Barnes's line quoted above:

Mine heart bound martyr to thy wills.

{426} Because 'will' by what is almost certainly a typographical accident is here printed _Will_ in the first edition of the sonnets, Professor Dowden is inclined to accept a reference to the supposititious friend Will, and to believe the poet to pray that the lady may have her Will, _i.e._ the friend 'Will [? W. H.]' This interpretation seems to introduce a needless complication.

{427a} See p. 83 _supra_.

{427b} The word 'sonnet' was often irregularly used for 'song' or 'poem.' A proper sonnet in Clement Robinson's poetical anthology, _A Handefull of Pleasant Delites_, 1584, is a lyric in ten four-line alternatively rhymed stanzas. Neither Barnabe Googe's _Eglogs_, _Epyttaphes_, _and Sonnettes_, 1563, nor George Turbervile's _Epitaphes_, _Epigrams_, _Songs and Sonets_, 1567, contains a single fourteen-lined poem. The French word 'quatorzain' was the term almost as frequently applied as 'sonnet' to the fourteen-line stanza in regular sonnet form, which alone falls within my survey. Watson is congratulated on 'scaling the skies in lofty _quatorzains_' in verses before his _Passionate Centurie_, 1582; cf. 'crazed quatorzains' in Thomas Nash's preface to his edition of Sidney's _Astrophel and Stella_, 1591; and _Amours in Quatorzains_ on the title-page of the first edition of Drayton's _Sonnets_, 1594.

{428a} See p. 103 _supra_.

{428b} All Watson's sonnets are reprinted by Mr. Arber in Watson's _Poems_, 1895.

{429a} In a preface to Newman's first edition of _Astrophel and Stella_ the editor, Thomas Nash, in a burst of exultation over what he deemed the surpassing merits of Sidney's sonnets, exclaimed: 'Put out your rushlights, you poets and rhymers! and bequeath your crazed quatorzains to the chandlers! for lo, here he cometh that hath broken your legs.' But the effect of Sidney's work was just the opposite to that which Nash anticipated. It gave the sonnet in England a vogue that it never enjoyed before or since.

{429b} With collections of sonnets of the first kind are occasionally interspersed sonnets of the second or third class, but I classify each sonnet-collection according to its predominant characteristic.

{429c} Daniel reprinted all but nine of the sonnets that had been unwarrantably appended to Sidney's _Astrophel_. These nine he permanently dropped.

{431} It is reprinted in Arber's _Garner_, ii. 225-64.

{432a} Arber's _Garner_, v. 333-486.

{432b} Ben Jonson developed the same conceit in his masque, _The Hue and Cry after Cupid_, 1608.

{433a} Dekker's well-known song, 'Oh, sweet content,' in his play of 'Patient Grisselde' (1599), echoes this sonnet of Barnes.

{433b} Arber's _Garner_, viii. 413-52.

{433c} There is a convenient reprint of Lodge's _Phillis in Elizabethan Sonnet-Cycles_ by Martha Foote Crow, 1896.

{435a} See p. 110, note.

{435b} Arber's _Garner_, vi. 135-49.

{435c} _Ib._ v. 61-86.

{435d} Reprinted in Arber's _English Scholars' Library_, 1882.

{435e} It was licensed for the press on November 19, 1594.

{436a} Reprinted for the Roxburghe Club in _A Lamport Garland_, 1881, edited by Mr. Charles Edmonds.

{436b} Sir John Davies's _Complete Poems_, edited by Dr. Grosart, i. 52-62.

{436c} See p. 128, note.

{437a} Arber's _Garner_, vii. 185-208.

{437b} _Ib._ v. 587-622.

{437c} Cf. Brydges's _Excerpta Tudoriana_, 1814, i. 35-7. One was printed with some alterations in Rosseter's _Book of Ayres_ (1610), and another in the _Third Book of Ayres_ (1617?); see Campion's Works, ed. A. H. Bullen, pp. 15-16, 102.

{437d} Arber's _Garner_, viii. 171-99.

{438a} See p. 390 and note.

{438b} Practically to the same category as these collections of sonnets belong the voluminous laments of lovers, in six, eight, or ten lined stanzas, which, though not in strict sonnet form, closely resemble in temper the sonnet-sequences. Such are _Willobie's Avisa_, 1594; _Alcilia_: _Philoparthen's Loving Folly_, by J. C., 1595; _Arbor of Amorous Deuices_, 1597 (containing two regular sonnets), by Nicholas Breton; _Alba_, _the Months Minde of a Melancholy Lover_, by Robert Tofte, 1598; _Daiphantus_, _or the Passions of Love_, by Anthony Scoloker, 1604; Breton's _The Passionate Shepheard_, _or The Shepheardes Loue_: _set downe in passions to his Shepheardesse Aglaia_: _with many excellent conceited poems and pleasant sonets fit for young heads to passe away idle houres_, 1604 (none of the 'sonets' are in sonnet metre); and John Reynolds's _Dolarnys Primerose_ . . . _wherein is expressed the liuely passions of Zeale and Loue_, 1606. Though George Wither's similar productions--his exquisitely fanciful _Fidelia_ (1617) and his _Faire-Virtue_, _the Mistresse of Phil' Arete_ (1622)--were published at a later period, they were probably designed in the opening years of the seventeenth century.

{439a} They were first printed in 1656, seven years after the author's death, in _Poems by that famous wit_, _William Drummond_, London, fol. The volume was edited by Edward Phillips, Milton's nephew. The best modern edition is that edited by Mr W. C. Ward in the 'Muses' Library (1894).

{439b} Cf. William Browne's _Poems_ in 'Muses' Library (1894), ii. 217 et seq.

{440} Chapman imitated Spenser by appending fourteen like sonnets to his translation of Homer in 1610; they were increased in later issues to twenty-two. Very numerous sonnets to patrons were appended by John Davies of Hereford to his _Microcosmos_ (1603) and to his _Scourge of Folly_ (1611). 'Divers sonnets, epistles, &c.' addressed to patrons by Joshua Sylvester between 1590 and his death in 1618 were collected in the 1641 edition of his _Du Bartas his divine weekes and workes_.

{441a} Remy Belleau in 1566 brought out a similar poetical version of the Book of Ecclesiastes entitled _Vanite_.

{441b} There are forty-eight sonnets on the Trinity and similar topics appended to Davies's _Wittes Pilgrimage_ (1610 ?).

{442a} Graphic illustrations of the attitude of Ronsard and his friends to a Greek poet like Anacreon appear in _Anacreon et les Poemes anacreontiques_, _Texte grec avec les Traductions et Imitations des Poetes du XVIe siecle_, par A. Delboulle (Havre, 1891). A translation of Anacreon by Remy Belleau appeared in 1556. Cf. Sainte-Beuve's essay, 'Anacreon au XVIe siecle,' in his _Tableau de la Poesie francaise au XVIe siecle_ (1893), pp. 432-47. In the same connection _Recueil des plus beaux Epigrammes grecs_, _mis en vers francois_, par Pierre Tamisier (edit. 1617), is of interest.

{442b} Italy was the original home of the sonnet, and it was as popular a poetic form with Italian writers of the sixteenth century as with those of the three preceding centuries. The Italian poets whose sonnets, after those of Petrarch, were best known in England and France in the later years of the sixteenth century were Serafino dell' Aquila (1466-1500), Jacopo Sannazzaro (1458-1530), Agnolo Firenzuola (1497-1547), Cardinal Bembo (1470-1547), Gaspara Stampa (1524-1553), Pietro Aretino (1492-1557), Bernardo Tasso (1493-1568), Luigi Tansillo (1510-1568), Gabriello Fiamma (_d._ 1585), Torquato Tasso (1544-1595), Luigi Groto (_fl._ 1570), Giovanni Battista Guarini (1537-1612), and Giovanni Battista Marino (1565-1625) (cf. Tiraboschi's _Storia della Letteratura Italiana_, 1770-1782; Dr. Garnett's _History of Italian Literature_, 1897; and Symonds's _Renaissance in Italy_, edit. 1898, vols. iv. and vi.) The notes to Watson's _Passionate Centurie of Love_, published in 1582 (see p. 103, note), to Davison's _Poetical Rhapsody_, edited by Mr. A. H. Bullen in 1891, and to the _Poems of Drummond of Hawthornden_, edited by Mr. W. C. Ward in 1894, give many illustrations of English sonnetteers' indebtedness to Serafino, Groto, Marino, Guarini, Tasso, and other Italian sonnetteers of the sixteenth century.

{445} There are modern reprints of most of these books, but not of all. There is a good reprint of Ronsard's works, edited by M. P. Blanchemain, in _La Bibliotheque Elzevirienne_, 8 vols. 1867; the _Etude sur la Vie de Ronsard_, in the eighth volume, is useful. The works of Remy Belleau are issued in the same series. The writings of the seven original members of 'La Pleiade' are reprinted in _La Pleiade Francaise_, edited by Marty-Laveaux, 16 vols., 1866-93. Maurice Seve's _Delie_ was reissued at Lyons in 1862. Pierre de Brach's poems were carefully edited by Reinhold Dezeimeris (2 vols., Paris, 1862). A complete edition of Desportes's works, edited by Alfred Michiels, appeared in 1863. Prosper Blanchemain edited a reissue of the works of Louise Labe in 1875. The works of Jean de la Taille, of Amadis Jamyn, and of Guillaume des Autels are reprinted in _Tresor des Vieux Poetes Francais_ (1877 et annis seq.) See Sainte-Beuve's _Tableau Historique et Critique de la Poesie Francaise du XVIe Siecle_ (Paris, 1893); Henry Francis Cary's _Early French Poets_ (London, 1846); Becq de Fouquieres' _OEuvres choisies des Poetes Francais du XVIe Siecle contemporains avec Ronsard_ (1880), and the same editor's selections from De Baif, Du Bellay, and Ronsard; Darmesteter et Hatzfeld's _Le Seizieme Siecle en France_--_Tableau de la Litterature et de la Langue_ (6th edit., 1897); and Petit de Julleville's _Histoire de la Langue et de la Litterature Francaise_ (1897, iii. 136-260).