Hamlet 24

The Sonnets.

The interest of all these poems sinks into in significance beside that of one remaining volume. The sonnets were entered in the Register on May 20, 1609, by the stationer Thomas Thorpe, and published by him under the title Shake speares Sonnets, never before Imprinted, in the same year. In addition to 154 sonnets the volume contains the elegiac poem A Lover's Complaint. If this is Shakespeare's, which is very doubt ful, it probably dates from the Venus and Adonis period. In 1640 the sonnets, together with other poems from The Passionate Pilgrim and elsewhere, many of them not Shakespeare's, were republished by John Benson in Poems Written by Wil. Shake speare, Gent. Here the sonnets are arranged in an altogether dif ferent order from that of 1609 and are declared by the publisher to "appeare of the same purity, the Authour himselfe then living avouched." No other Shakespearian controversy has received so much attention as that concerning itself with the date, character and literary history of the sonnets. This is intelligible enough, since upon the issues raised depends the question whether these poems do or do not give a glimpse into the intimate depths of a personality which otherwise is at the most only imperfectly revealed through the plays. On the whole, the balance of au thority is in favour of regarding them as in a very considerable measure autobiographical. This view has undergone the fires of much destructive argument. The authenticity of the order in which the sonnets were printed in 1609 and even Shakespeare's authorship of some of them have been doubted; and their subject matter has been variously explained as being of the nature of a philosophical allegory, of an effort of the dramatic imagination, or of a heartless exercise in the forms of the Petrarchan conven tion. This last theory rests upon the false psychological assump tion, which is disproved by the whole history of poetry and in particular of Petrarchan poetry, that the use of conventions is inconsistent with the expression of unfeigned emotions; and it is hardly to be set against the direct conviction which the sonnets carry to the most finely critical minds of the strength and sin cerity of the spiritual experience out of which they were wrought. This conviction makes due allowance for the inevitable heighten ing of emotion itself in the act of poetic composition; and it cer tainly does not carry with it a belief that all the external events which underlie the emotional development are capable at this distance of time of inferential reconstruction. But it does accept the sonnets as reflecting a part of Shakespeare's life during the years in which they were written, and as revealing at least the outlines of a drama which played itself out for once, not in his imagination but in his actual conduct in the world of men and women.

There is no advantage to be gained by rearranging the order of the 1609 volume, even if there were any basis other than that of individual whim on which to do so. Many of the sonnets are obviously linked to those which follow or precede them; and although a few may conceivably be misplaced, the order as a whole does not jar against the sense of emotional continuity, which is the only possible test that can be applied. The last two son nets, however, are merely alternative versions of a Greek epigram, and it is a hazardous assumption that all of the rest have a com mon subject-matter. On this assumption, however, they have generally been interpreted somewhat as follows. There are two series, which are more probably parallel than successive. The shorter of these (cxxvii.-clii.) appears to be the record of the poet's relations with a mistress, a dark woman with raven brows and mourning eyes. In the earlier sonnets he undertakes the half playful defence of black beauty against the blond Elizabethan ideal; but the greater number are in a more serious vein, and are filled with a deep consciousness of the bitterness of lustful pas sion and of the slavery of the soul to the body. The woman is a wanton. She has broken her bed-vow for Shakespeare, who on his side is forsworn in loving her ; and she is doubly forsworn in proving faithless to him with other men. His reason condemns her, but his heart has not the power to throw off her tyranny. Her particular offence is that she, "a woman coloured ill," has cast her snares not only upon him, but upon his friend, "a man right fair," who is his "better angel," and that thus his loss is double, in love and friendship. The longer series (i.-cxxvi.) is

written to a man, appears to extend over a considerable period of time, and covers a wide range of sentiment. The person addressed is younger than Shakespeare, and of higher rank. He is lovely, and the son of a lovely mother, and has hair like the auburn buds of marjoram. The series falls into a number of groups, which are rarely separated by any sharp lines of demar cation. Perhaps the first group (i.-xvii.) is the most distinct of all. These sonnets are a prolonged exhortation by Shakespeare to his friend to marry and beget children. The friend is now on the top of happy hours, and should make haste. before the rose of beauty dies, to secure himself in his descendants against devour ing time. In the next group (xviii.-xxv.) a much more personal note is struck, and the writer assumes the attitudes, at once of the poet whose genius is to be devoted to eternizing the beauty and the honour of his patron, and of the friend whose absorbing affection is always on the point of assuming an emotional colour indistinguishable from that of love. The consciousness of ad vancing years and that of a fortune which bars the triumph of public honour alike find their consolation in this affection. A period of absence (xxvi.-xxxii.) follows, in which the thought of friendship comes to remedy the daily labour of travel and the sor rows of a life that is "in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes" and filled with melancholy broodings over the past. Then (xxxiii. xlii.) comes an estrangement. The friend has committed a sensual fault, which is at the same time a sin against friendship. He has been wooed by a woman loved by the poet, who deeply resents the treachery, but in the end forgives it, and bids the friend take all his loves, since all are included in the love that has been freely given him. It is difficult to escape the suggestion that this episode of the conflict between love and friendship is the same as that which inspired some of the "dark woman" sonnets. Another journey (xliii.-lii.) is again filled with thoughts of the friend, and its record is followed by a group of sonnets (liii.-lv.) in which the friend's beauty and the immortality which this will find in the poet's verse are especially dwelt upon. Once more there is a parting (lvi.-lxi.) and the poet awaits as patiently as may be his friend's return to him. Again (lxii.-lxv.) he looks to his verse to give the friend immortality. He is tired of the world, but his friend redeems it (lxvi.-lxviii.). Then rumours of some scandal against his friend (lxix.-1xx.) reach him, and he falls (lxxi. lxxiv.) into gloomy thoughts of coming death. The friend, how ever, is still (lxxv.-lxxvii.) his argument; and he is perturbed (lxxviii.-lxxxvi.) by the appearance of a rival poet, who claims to be taught by spirits to write "above a mortal pitch," and with "the proud full sail of his great verse" has already won the coun tenance of Shakespeare's patron. There is another estrangement (lxxxvii.-xc.), and the poet, already crossed with the spite of fortune, is ready not only to acquiesce in the loss of friendship, but to find the fault in himself. The friend returns to him, but the relation is still clouded by doubts of his fidelity (xci.-xciii.) and by public rumours of his wantonness (xciv.-xcvi.). For a third time the poet is absent (xcvii.-xcix.) in summer and spring. Then comes an apparent interval, after which a love already three years old is renewed (c.-civ.), with even richer praises (cv.-cviii.). It is now the poet's turn to offer apologies (cix.-cxii.) for offences against friendship and for some brand upon his name apparently due to the conditions of his profession. He is again absent (cxiii.) and again renews his protestations of the imperishability of love (cxiv.-cxvi.) and of his own unworthiness (cxvii.-cxxi.), for which his only excuse is in the fact that the friend was once unkind. If the friend has suffered as Shakespeare suffered, he has "passed a hell of time." The series closes with a group (cxxii.-cxxv.) in which love is pitted against time ; and an envoi, not in sonnet form, warns the "lovely boy" that in the end nature must render up her treasure.