Hamlet 24

Mystery of "Mr. W.

H."—Such an analysis can give no ade quate idea of the qualities in these sonnets, whereby the appeal of universal poetry is built up on a basis of intimate self-revelation. The human document is so legible, and at the same time so in complete, that it is easy to understand the strenuous efforts which have been made to throw further light upon it by tracing the identities of those other personalities, the man and the woman, through his relations to whom the poet was brought to so fiery an ordeal of soul, and even to the borders of self-abasement. It must be added that the search has, as a rule, been conducted with more ingenuity than judgment. It has generally started from the terms of a somewhat mysterious dedication prefixed by the pub lisher Thomas Thorpe to the volume of 1609. This runs as fol lows :—"To the onlie begetter of these insuing sonnets Mr. W. H. all happinesse and that eternitie promised by our ever-living poet wisheth the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth T. T." The natural interpretation of this is that the inspirer or "begetter" of the sonnets bore the initials W. H. ; and contemporary history has accordingly been ransacked to find a W. H. whose age and circumstances might conceivably fit the conditions of the problem which the sonnets present. It is perhaps a want of historical perspective which has led to the centring of controversy around two names belonging to the highest ranks of the Elizabethan nobility, those of Henry Wriothesley, earl of Southampton, and William Herbert, earl of Pembroke. There is some evidence to connect Shakespeare with both of these. To Southampton he dedicated Venus and Adonis in 1593 and The Rape of Lucrece in 1594, and the story that he received a gift of no less than LI,000 from the earl is recorded by Rowe. His acquaintance with Pembroke can only be inferred from the statement of Heminge and Condell in their preface to the First Folio of the plays, that Pembroke and his brother Montgomery had "prosequuted both them and their Authour living, with so much favour." The per sonal beauty of the rival claimants and of their mothers, their amours and the attempts of their families to persuade them to marry, their relations to poets and actors, and all other points in their biographies which do or do not fit in with the indications of the sonnets, have been canvassed with great spirit and some erudition, but with no very conclusive result. It is in Pembroke's favour that his initials were in fact W. H., whereas Southampton's can only be turned into W. H. by a process of metathesis; and his champions have certainly been more successful than Southamp ton's in producing a woman, a certain Mary Fitton, who was a mistress of Pembroke's, and was in consequence dismissed in dis grace from her post of maid of honour to Elizabeth. Unfortunate ly, the balance of evidence is in favour of her having been blond, and not "black." Moreover, a careful investigation of the sonnets, as regards their style and their relation to the plays, renders it almost impossible on chronological grounds that Pem broke can have been their subject. He was born on April 9, 158o, and was therefore much younger than Southampton, who was born on Oct. 6, 1573. The earliest sonnets postulate a marriage able youth, certainly not younger than 18, an age which South ampton reached in the autumn of 1591 and Pembroke in the spring of 1598. The writing of the sonnets may have extended over many years, but it is impossible to doubt that as a whole it is to the years 1593-98 rather than to the years 1598-1603 that they belong. There is not, indeed, much external evidence available. Francis Meres in his Palladis Tamia of 1598 mentions Shake speare's "sugred sonnets among his private friends," but this allusion might come as well near the beginning as at the end of the series; and the fact that two, not of the latest, sonnets are in The Passionate Pilgrim of 1599 is equally inconclusive.

The only reference to an external event in the sonnets them selves, which might at first sight seem useful, is in the following lines (cvii.) The mortal moon bath her eclipse endured, And the sad augurs mock their own presage; Incertainties now crown themselves assured, And peace proclaims olives of endless age.

This has been variously interpreted as referring to the death of Elizabeth and accession of James in 1603, to the relief caused by the death of Philip II. of Spain in 1598, and to the illness of Elizabeth and threatened Spanish invasion in 1596. Obviously the "mortal moon" is Elizabeth, but although "eclipse" may well mean "death," it is not quite so clear that "endure an eclipse" can mean "die."

Nor do the allusions to the rival poet help much. "The proud full sail of his great verse" would fit, on critical grounds, with Spenser, Marlowe, Chapman and possibly Peele, Daniel or Drayton; and the "affable familiar ghost," from whom the rival is said to obtain assistance by night, might conceivably be an echo of a passage in one of Chapman's dedications. Daniel in scribed a poem to Southampton in 1603, but with this exception none of the poets named is known to have written either for Southampton or for Pembroke, or for any other W. H. or H. W., during any year which can possibly be covered by the sonnets. Two very minor poets, Barnabe Barnes and Gervase Markham, addressed sonnets to Southampton in 1593 and 1595 respectively, and Thomas Nashe composed improper verses for his delectation.

But even if external guidance fails, the internal evidence for 1593-98 as approximately the sonnet period in Shakespeare's life is very strong indeed. It has been worked out in detail by two German scholars, Hermann Isaac (now Conrad) in the Shakespeare-Jahrbuch for 1884, and Gregor Sarrazin in William Shakespeares Lehrjahre (1897) and Aus Shakespeares Meister werkstatt (1906). Conrad's work, in particular, has hardly re ceived enough attention even from recent English scholars, prob ably because he makes the mistakes of taking the sonnets in Bodenstedt's order instead of Shakespeare's, and of beginning his whole chronology several years too early in order to gratify a fantastic identification of W. H. with the earl of Essex. This, however, does not affect the main force of an argument by which the affinities of the great bulk of the sonnets are shown, on the ground of stylistic similarities, parallelisms of expression, and parallelisms of theme, to be far more close with the poems and with the range of plays from Love's Labour's Lost to Henry IV., than with any earlier or later section of Shakespeare's work. This dating has the further advantage of putting Shakespeare's sonnets in the full tide of Elizabethan sonnet-production, which began with the publication of Sidney's Astrophel and Stella in 1591 and Daniel's Delia and Constable's Diana in 1592, rather than during years for which this particular kind of poetry had already ceased to be modish. It is to the three volumes named that the influence upon Shakespeare of his predecessors can most clearly be traced ; while he seems in his turn to have served as a model for Drayton, whose sonnets to Idea were published in a series of volumes in 1594, 1599, 16o2, 1605 and 1619. It does not of course follow that because the sonnets belong to 1593-98 W. H. is to be identified with Southampton. On general grounds he is likely, even if above Shakespeare's own rank, to have been somewhat nearer that rank than a great earl, some young gentle man, for example, of such a family as the Sidneys, or as the Walsinghams of Chislehurst.

It is possible that there is an allusion to Shakespeare's romance in a poem called "Willobie his Avisa," published in 1594 as from the pen of one Henry Willoughby, apparently of West Knoyle, in Wiltshire. In this Willoughby, enamoured of an innkeeper's wife, apparently at Sherborne, takes counsel with "his familiar friend W. S. who not long before had tryed the curtesy of the like pas sion, and was now newly recovered of the like infection." But there is nothing outside the poem to connect Shakespeare with a family of Willoughbys or with the neighbourhood of West Knoyle or Sherborne. Various other identifications of W. H. have been suggested, which rarely rest upon anything except a similarity of initials. There is little likelihood in a theory broached by Sir Sidney Lee, that W. H. was not the friend of the sonnets at all, but a certain William Hall, who was himself a printer, and might, it is conjectured, have obtained the "copy" of the sonnets for Thorpe. Rather more plausible is Sir William Harvey, the third husband of Southampton's mother. But, although it is just pos sible that "begetter" might mean, not "inspirer," but "procurer for the press," the interpretation is shipwrecked on the obvious identity of the person to whom Thorpe "wishes" eternity with the person to whom the poet "promised" that eternity. The ex ternal history of the sonnets must still be regarded as an unsolved problem; the most that can be said is that their subject may just possibly be Southampton, and cannot possibly be Pembroke.