When Shakespeare Wrote the Sonnets

by LESLIE HOTSON

1

BECAUSE their beauty and power of emotion clothed in thought are supreme, and because in them we feel drawn closer to the heart of Shakespeare than anywhere in his plays, his Sonnets have aroused enormous interest, almost as much as Hamlet has done. But questions about them have also produced volumes of diverse comment, and a perplexing library of conflicting theory.

Here we are going to look over the shoulder of this master poet of the modern era, as in his verse he views stirring events on the march. We shall discover him commenting on his world’s narrow escape from total destruction; on the crucial naval battle of the century; on the most signal triumph of engineering; on the assassination of the King of France.

Stranger still, in doing so we shall uncover what the world has never suspected: the fact that Shakespeare’s poetic powers were full-grown when he was no more than twenty-five.

The Sonnets have been called a maze, a labyrinth, the most intricate puzzle in Shakespeare. Yet John Benson, republishing them in 1640, told his readers, “You shall find them serene, clear, and elegantly plain; . . . no intricate or cloudy stuff to puzzle intellect, but perfect eloquence.” Benson was born in Shakespeare’s lifetime, before theories about the Sonnets had been invented. We should remember that Shakespeare was no mystifier. Both he and his audience knew what he was talking about.

The first “mystery” is, When were the Sonnets written? No agreement has been reached on this primary question. If we could fix that date, we should have a standpoint from which perhaps to decide what (if anything) there is in the rival theories which see in Shakespeare’s friend “ Mr. W. H.” either the Earl of Southampton or the Earl of Pembroke. What is far more important than anything else, by finding out where the Sonnets belong in the story of Shakespeare’s development, we might correct and enlarge our understanding of our greatest poet.

Shakespeare has not left us without clues to work upon. Two or three of his Sonnets are recognized as carrying external or topical references. This being so, it is curious that no one has carefully compared these references with the news, to discover to what notable events between 1585 and 1605 the topical sonnets refer. Whatever the reason, this vital job of collation has not been done. In comparing the facts of his times with the poet’s references, we must begin without a theory, and be ready to follow where the evidence leads. Only in this way shall we see his topical references plain.

THE MORTAL MOON

107

This is the chief “dating sonnet.,”and it has been called the most difficult of all. And here I think we shall find that the world has been led down a false trail by assuming that the mortal moon means Queen Elizabeth, and that hath her eclipse endur’d means either that she is dead, or that she has survived a dangerous crisis in her life.

To read it as “the Queen is dead” would place this sonnet in 1603; yet there are serious objections to this interpretation. For the Elizabethan vogue of sonnet-writing, 1603 is too late. It is also too late in Shakespeare’s career to suit with the style and tone of his Sonnets, in one of which he describes himself as a beginner, wielding a “pupil pen. Most critics have therefore taken the second meaning that the mortal moon is the living Queen.

But this theory will not stand the test of the times. All the English poets write of their beloved Queen in terms approaching adoration. She is a goddess come to earth, a heaven-born Astræa. “This is that Queen, as writers truly say, That God had marked down to live for aye.” She is Diana. “Time weares her not . . . Mortalitie belowe her orbe is plaste.” Her word is Ever the Same. Her loyal subjects neither wish nor dare to remind her that she is mortal. “Wee are afraid,’ says John Donne, “to speake to the great men of this world of their death, but nourish in them a vaine imagination of immortality.”Loathing the advances of creeping Time, Elizabeth carries her a version to the mention of death to strange lengths. Informed by the unwary Lord North that a certain covered pie is called a “coffin,” she bursts out in anger, “And are you such a fool, to give a pie such a name?”

Mortal moreover carries a meaning even more hideous, and one equally common in Shakespeare’s works: deadly, death-dealing. “Mortal poison, “mortal murders,” “mortal butcher, “mortal rage.” To fancy Shakespeare deliberately writing of his “imperial vot’ress ” not only that she is mortal,but that she has been obscured by an eclipse, is to imagine him a greater fool than Lord North.

If it cannot be Elizabeth, what then is this mortal moon? For more than three centuries the answer has vainly stared us in the face. It is the deadly Spanish Armada of 1588 — the mightiest, floating army that the world had ever seen — which in her menacing moon-shaped line ot battle appeared in the English Channel, only to be shattered by the drumfire of Elizabeth’s heavy guns, and driven northward away before an irresistible gale into ignominy, disaster, and eclipse.

“. . . their fleete was placed in battell araie. after the maner of a Moone cressant, being readie with her horns & hir inward circumference to receiue either all. or so manie of the English nauie, as should giue her the assault.” — PETRUCCIO FBALDINO,A Discourse concerninge the Spanish fleete (1588).

“. . . a horned Moone of huge and mighty shippes. . . . But all is vaine: for the breath of the Lords mouth hath dimmed the brightnesse of her Moone, and scattered those proud shippes.” — J[ames] L[ea], The Birth. Purpose, and mortall Wound of the Romish holie League (1589).

The mortal moon hath her eclipse endur’d. That Shakespeare, like James Lea in his triumphant political cartoon, is here in Sonnet 107 celebrating the eclipse suffered by the deadly “Moone of huge and mighty shippes” now appears, as John Benson might say, serene, clear, and elegantly plain.

But if in any mind there lingers a doubt, it is set at rest by Shakespeare himself. For in his dealing with another great sea fight which likewise marked a turning point in history, we now discover him repeating his metaphor of an eclipsed moon for a defeated fleet. This was the Battle of Actiumon the Ionian Sea, in which the huge heavy galleys of Antony and Cleopatra, crowded with people and not well manned, were beaten by the smaller, nimbler, battle-wise craft of Octavius and Agrippa. Like every Englishman reading his Plutarch, Shakespeare would note that parallel with the Armada light. The ranked fleets of beaked galleys faced each other in curving linc-abreast. After Agrippa had lured out Antony’s left wing from its well-nigh impregnable position and the fierce struggle had been joined, Cleopatra and her Egyptian contingent of sixty great ships, shamefully followed by her enslaved Antony, “fled From (hat great, face of war whose several ranges Frighted each other.”

In a later scene, Shakespeare shows the “noble ruin” Antony plunged in gloom, his soul oppressed by the ominous defeat of their Eastern fleet. He cannot hear Cleopatra: —

Terrene is a short form of Mediterranean, favorite with the geographer Ortelius and the dramatist Marlowe: “not far from Alexandria, Whereas the Terrene and the Red Sea meet.” The mighty battlecrescent of their Mediterranean fleet has suffered eclipse, giving infallible omen of Antony’s fall.

2

THE mortal moon sonnet, then, is Shakespeare on the Armada. If this capital fact is now evident, we should also find in the poem some reference to the fatal and wonderful year, 1588: the menacing, longprophesied Eighty-eight, ever memorable in the world’s mind for the destruction of the Invincible Fleet. For in retrospect the two were inseparable: —

“ The miraculous victory atchieved by the English Fleete . . . upon the Spanish huge Armada sent in the yeere 1588. Having in part declared the strange and wonderfull events of the yeere eightie eight, which hath bene so long time foretold by ancient prophesies; we will now make relation of the most notable and great enterprise of all others which were in the foresaid yeere atchieved.” — EMANUEL VAN METEREN, History of the Low Countries (1602), Ch. XV.

“Witness that admirable year eighty-eight ... It was a year of strange expectation, before it came, and of admiration, when it was come. Some designed it to be the end of the world, but were deceived. Others designed it to be the doomsday of England, the ruin of our Church and religion, and the funerals of our prince, people, and kingdom, all on one day: but these also through the great mercy of God were deceived.” — THOMAS TAYLOR, “Eighty Eight,” a sermon (1631).

The year of universal apprehension, in which the world expected the day of doom, or at the least miracles full of peril — such was the year 1588. It had loomed for more than a century, ever since that “most notorious prophesie” of 1475, attributed to Johann Müller of Königsberg (Regiomontanus). His “Germanical Rhythmes” were expanded into Latin verses, of which the following was one English version: —

As the time foretold inexorably drew near, this was regarded as “ the onely prophesie of the world.” The embattled Protestants worked out 1588 as the world’s “grand climacterical,” and ominous corroboration came from the astronomers. They pointed to 1588’s threatening conjunction of the planets Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars; and “in the selfsame yeere 88 . . . the Sunne shall be eclipsed the 16. day of February at the change; and shortly after, at the very next full, namely the second day of March there shall follow a Totall Eclipse of the Moone.” On top of this, there would be a second “vniuersall Eclipse of the Moon this 88. to befall the 26. day of August.” Three eclipses in one year!

Alarm was so deep and general that books had to be written to combat the auguries of dread. John Harvey devised a discourse “especially in abatement of the terrible threatenings, and menaces, peremptorily denounced against the kingdoms, and states of the world, this present famous yeere, 1588. supposed the Greatwoonderfull, and Entail yeere of our Age.” Ministers were preaching repentance before Judgment, as a “Preparation against the prognosticated dangers of this yeare 1588.” Broadside ballads and books were printed “Of the end of the world,” For everything clearly pointed to a present fulfilment of the Gospel prophecy of the Last Day.

3

SUCH were the universal fears and auguries of 1588. And the arrogant Spaniards, “Who by report through all the world, had won The name of conquest ere the fight begun,” assumed that the prophecy would be fulfilled by the fall of England under the blows of their military might. To advertise their purpose, and to strike terror into los lutheranos, they painted their England-bound battleships black, and flew great “pennons tragicall” bearing “sad ostents of death and dismall feare.”

Now let us read again the beginning of Shakespeare’s sonnet: —

His plays amply show Shakespeare as a man of his age, believing in signs and portents, He and the world he lived in had every reason to fear what 1588 might bring. And that the soul in sleep could see into the future was another belief commonly held: “any person going to his rest . . . his Soule (in sleeping) may fore-see many thinges to come.” The doom prophesied would have put a “confine,” a limit or end, to the life of the world with everything in it, including the poet’s love.

But Eighty-eight with all its terrors and eclipses has come — and gone! The apprehensions of doomsday have proved baseless.

The Invincible Armada has suffered defeat: an event, writes Professor Trevelyan, “which all Europe at once recognized as a turning point in history.” Instead of cataclysm, 1588 brought to England, and to all Protestant Europe with her, the rejoicing dawn of certain deliverance. The relief was indescribable.

Here is where the modern historian leads us astray, He likes to call the Armada fight the beginning of Elizabeth’s formal hostilities with Philip, leaving us to think that Shakespeare’s countrymen now knew they were at war. How totally different was the view of the man on the spot! For him, the victory of Eighty-eight brought not war, but the certain assurance of peace for England. There would be no invasion and butchery, such as the Low Countries suffered under Alva. No savage civil wars of religion, like those torturing France. Throughout her reign, whatever forces she might dispatch to fight her enemies abroad, Elizabeth was incessantly extolled for keeping her land at peace.

The drops of this most balmy time — after the eclipse of the deadly Spanish moon — have brought life revived and fresh out of the shadow of doom. Balm is the biblical Balm of Gilead or Balsam of Mecca, the prime life-restoring elixir.

Now that the Elizabethans have given us the indispensable background, we are better equipped to attempt a running comment on the thought of Sonnet 107, as follows: —

The poet’s fear, shared with the whole Protestant world, of the dread cataclysm foretold for 1588, has not been able to put an end to his love. The foe’s ”invincible” battle-crescent has, however, met disaster; and the prophets of doom are laughing at their recent fears. Danger of invasion and civil war has vanished as if blown away with the storm that wrecked the beaten Armada. Elizabeth’s Englishmen find themselves joyfully gazing down far vistas of assured peace. To minds hurt by cruel apprehension and suspense, the miraculous passing of 1588 not only in safety but crowned with victory has come as a life-restoring balm. In this blessed time of deliverance, love has renewed its youth. Death, shorn of his terrors, now submits to the poet, whose verse is his passport to immortality. The poet’s friend, the subject of his lines, will be remembered when the crowns and tombs of the defeated tyrants Philip and Sixtus are long gone into oblivion.

4

IT IS deeply satisfying to find that long before he sang the glory of Agincourt, Shakespeare had begun by recording with his “pupil pen” the overthrow of the Invincible Armada, the eclipse of the Spanish dream of world dominion. As soon as we locate the spiritual landscape— the passing of 1588 — in which it was written, Shakespeare’s most difficult sonnet becomes clear and plain. May not other sonnets that now seem puzzling or obscure behave in the same way?

THE RIDDLE OF THE NEW-OLD PYRAMIDS

123

In this sonnet addressed to Time, Shakespeare nonchalantly declares, Thy pyramids built up with newer might To me are nothing novel. By these ostensibly novel pyramids of old Time he obviously cannot mean structures as stupendous as the Great Pyramid of Gizeh. No monsters like that were constructed in his age. But what then does he mean?

Elizabethans habitually broadened the sense of pyramids to include slim spires, and particularly obelisks. Marlowe describes ships’ masts as “pyramides”; and in Rome his Mephistophilis promises to show Doctor Faustus the great Egyptian obelisk in front of St. Peter’s, which he calls the “high pyramides that Julius Caesar brought from Africa.” In short, were you to show Shakespeare Cleopatra’s Needle and the Washington Monument today, he would naturally call them both pyramids.

If we now substitute the word obelisk in Shakespeare’s line—Thy obelisks built up with newer might — and at the same time recall Elizabethan news about building, at once a flood of light breaks in. For the mightiest builder in all the world in Shakespeare’s time was the enterprising, tenacious, and severe Pope Sixtus V, who reigned from 1585 to 1590. So many were his notable constructions that under his hand Rome rose from its ruins and “forthwith doubled itself.” His most spectacular and world-famous achievement, however, was the re-erection, as “monuments of religious magnificence,” of four age-old obelisks. These had been brought from Egypt to Imperial Rome by the Caesars and — all but one — were long since thrown down, broken, and even lost many feet under ground.

Mighty Sixtus, who regarded himself as one of the two most powerful temporal kings in the world, set up a great Egyptian obelisk in each of the years 1586, 1587, 1588, and 1589. They stand today where he stationed them. The hugest one in existence, which in 1588 he erected by S. Giovanni in Laterano, had been discovered the year before buried in the Circus Maximus, broken into three pieces. This giant of red granite had therefore to be “born” — extracted from Mother Earth — and then literally “built,” requiring in its broken state more “building” than the placing of an entire monolith on a pedestal.

But first in priority, as well as alone in its glory of having survived the centuries unbroken and erect, was the Vatican obelisk, familiarly known as St. Peter’s Needle — la guglia di San Pietro, “the largest entire obelisk out of Egypt, and the second in size in the world.” It stood near the Basilica, deep in the mud and rubbish of what had once been the spina of the race track of Nero’s Circus. The work of taking it down, moving it to its present commanding site, and re-erecting it on a splendid pedestal in 1586 was the first and most dramatic feat to bring universal fame to the Pope’s brilliant engineer, Domenico Fontana.

Flocks of important persons hastened to Rome from the corners of Europe to witness the marvelous operation. As the biographer of Sixtus tells us: —

“Contemporary letters, reports of the diplomats, the stage-plays . . . , numberless verses celebrating the event, and even views of the city of Rome published for visitors, by the exaggerated size they give to the obelisk, all witness to the sympathetic interest Europe took in the successful accomplishment of an enterprise which the leading authorities of art and engineering [Michelangelo and Antonio de Sangallo] had pronounced impossible. Strangers just off the ship ran to see the Needle.” &emdash; BARON J. A. DE HÜBNER, Sixte-Quint, Vol. If. “The Needle.”

The rediscovery in the following year of the tallest obelisk ever quarried, together with its excavation and its building in 1588 as the Obelisco Lateranense, was a fresh “sensation.” And in 1589 Pope Sixtus was once more in the news with a fourth obelisk, likewise dug up out of the Circus Maximus, which he erected in the Piazza della Madonna del Popolo. This was his last: he died in August, 1590.

The topical force of Shakespeare’s pyramids for the period about 1589 is now evident. On rereading the sonnet with our eyes opened to the background of the world news, we can now offer a comprehensible summary, somewhat as follows: —

Standing firm himself, the poet scorns the tricks of Time, He declines to join the childish world in its admiration over a nine days’ wonder which it regards as a “strange novelty.” Everybody’s talking about the pyramids brought forth — as if produced for their special delight —from the womb of earth by the autocrat of Rome and his engineer. The poet is not impressed. After all, these obelisks, while newly set up, consecrated, and dressed with his coat of arms and Christian crosses by Sixtus, are in fact no new invention, but some three thousand years old, and we had heard about them from historians. Though now palmed off as a novelty on an ignorant world gaping for curiosities, their austere shafts, bearing Time’s registers in royal hieroglyphs, were common sights ages ago.

But the poet puts no trust either in Time or in his deceptive memorials. Time’s restless pace often destroys his own records, thus making them less. Just now, on the other hand, he has had some lost and forgotten ones dug up, thus making them more, fickle and unreliable as he thus shows himself, who will believe him? The poet will remain unchanged and a true friend in spite of all that Time the deceiver and destroyer can do.

Notorious events as reported to the Elizabethan world have shown us approximately how Shakespeare’s contemporaries would understand the allusions in this sonnet. So far from being metaphorical, intricate, and cloudy (as they seemed to our modern ignorance), they were clear, concrete, and topical. We can easily see now what was conveyed by pyramids, newer might, novel, dressings of a former sight, admire what thou dost foist upon us that is old, and thy registers.

As for the date of this sonnet, I place it in 1589. Since pyramids is in the plural, it cannot have been written before 1587, when the second obelisk (S. Maria Maggiore) was set up. The topicality of the term novel, meaning new, the latest thing; the phrase not wond’ring at the present; the admired “ birth ” of the excavated pyramids of 1588 and 1589 to the satisfaction of a sensation-hungry age in which (as Tom Nashe writes in 1589) “men hast vnto nouelties, and runne to see new tilings”; and the present tense of what thou dost foist upon us — all these indicate that the sonnet was written while the obelisks were still being set up: while, in short, they were “news.” After the death of Sixtus in August, 1590, the newer might of that powerful figure was a thing of the past, and the Roman pyramids were no longer either novel or news.

5

HAVING found that the topicalities of Sonnet 107 — the mortal moon — and Sonnet 123 — the pyramids— lead us to refer them both pretty closely to the year 1589, let us now turn to scrutinize the political allusions in the sonnet which immediately follows the pyramids.

THE BLOW OF THRALLED DISCONTENT

124

Here we find Shakespeare contrasting the strong, sure structure of his love for his friend with the pitiful insecurity of some prince, some child of state, subject to accident, who suffers in smiling pomp and falls under the blow of thralled discontent.

Very little familiarity with the momentous events of Shakespeare’s times is required to recognize the ruler he is thinking of. A prince who, suffering shameful deprivation of his royal power, had with smiles dissembled his fierce resentment. A prince who, after waiting his time, deftly murdering his two capital enemies and reporting his deliverance to his politic Queen Mother, himself fell under the blow of an assassin who thought him a tyrant. This Fortune’s bustard, this victim of Time’s hate, is Henry of Valois, King Henri 111 of France, favorite child of Catherine de’ Medici, and sometime suitor for Elizabeth’s hand.

The first great accident or misfortune that befell him was Paris’s famous Day of Barricades, May 12, 1588, which the Venetian ambassador in Madrid called “ l’accidente di Francia contra quel povero Re” — the accident of France against that poor King. On that day the people of Paris rose against their King in support of his enemies, the Duke of Guise and the Holy Leaguers, who already had strong foreign backing in Pope Sixtus and Philip of Spain. Escaping immediate deposition by a hair’s breadth, Henry managed to get away. He was obliged, however, to convoke the hostile States-General, which sat at Blois throughout the autumn scorning him as a do-nothing King, and preparing to make their “Cæsar,” the Duke of Guise, master of the throne.

Elizabeth’s ambassador to Henry, Sir Edward Stafford, describes for his Queen how her former suitor suffered in smiling pomp and hid his hate in affability. Stafford writes that though Henry “was enforced to sett a faire face on the matter, and wisely to dissemble,” he “laye hoovering in the winde to take the Duke and his fellow-conspirators at an advantage, when he might safelie . . . be revenged upon their cursed bodies.” In an earlier dispatch Stafford had sent off the first news of Henry’s successful murder of the Duke, with his belief—later confirmed — that Guise’s brother, the Cardinal of Lorraine, was also killed: Guise, he reports, “was slaine by 8 of the quarante cinq who were there appointed for the same purpose; who executed their charge so promptly as after he was entred into the said antechamber, hee neuer spake word vntill he was dead. The King beeing assured that hee was dead, and hatting seene him on the ground, hee went to his mother and told her, Madame I am now come to tell you that I am King without companion, and that the Duke of Guise, t h’ enemy of all my proccedinges, is dispatched.”

A few months later, in August, 1589, the news was that “Blood hath bought blood and blows have answer’d blows.” As a contemporary partisan historian tells it, “a diuellish Monke, an excrement of hell, a lacobin by profession, lames Clement, . . . vowes (said he) to kill the Tyrant, and to deliuer the Cittie beseeged by Sennacherib. . . . The King bends his eare, but instead of hearing what he expected, this wretch drawes a knife out of his sleeue made of purpose, thrusts his Maiesty into the botome of the belly, and there leaues the knife in the wound.”

This brings us back to Shakespeare’s phrase, falls under the blow of thralled discontent; and we can now consider the background of the sonnet as a whole.

News of political assassinations has come thick and fast across the Channel to England. Not long ago Henry of France murdered the uncles of Mary Queen of Scots, the Duke of Guise and the Cardinal of Lorraine. Now we hear that a disgruntled friar, a partisan of the League, has murdered the King. “Slaying is the word; it is a deed in fashion.” It makes us wonder whether English traitors may not take to king-killing in the French style, whereto th' inviting time our fashion calls.

Shakespeare’s theme in this sonnet is the grand impregnability of his love. Like some great and wise monarch of the forest, it fears no attack. Its growth is neither cheered by warmth nor checked by floods. But the contrasting image with which he began — some insecure prince such as the wretched fallen Henry of France, lightly plucked from life like a weed or flower — inevitably conjures up as its opposite the strong majestic figure of his English Queen, untouched by the many attempts on her life. He fuses the thought of her with the poetic image of his love. Any crafty assaults upon his love are to be scorned: they are as futile and fatuous as the short-laid, Jesuit-inspired plots to cut down Elizabeth. To this I witness call the fools of time, Which die for goodness, who have liv’d for crime. These fools of time, who on the scaffold say they committed treason for religion’s or conscience’ sake, recall the young gentlemen of the recent Babington Plot to kill the Queen. Their folly and crime are repeatedly censured in contemporary books.

6

SO MUCH for the more obvious allusions we have discovered in Sonnets 107, 123, and 124. Against the modern subjective criticism which treats these sonnets as difficult or obscure, John Benson’s opinion in 1640 that they will be found clear and plain stands vindicated by the simple expedient of looking into the leading events of Shakespeare’s Europe.

As for the date of these sonnets, we have seen that the mortal moon was written in 1589, after the close of the Wonderful Year. The pyramids sonnet, 1587-1589, most probably in 1589. The blow of thralled discontent puts Sonnet 124 in 1589, after the beginning of August.

What do these discoveries reveal about the date of the rest of the Sonnets? In the 1609 arrangement as published by Thomas Thorpe, these three all stand near the close of the “first series” of 126 sonnets. And most of the proposed rearrangements likewise regard them as belonging near the end of the group.

Here is a fact of cardinal importance. It indicates that Shakespeare completed this main group of his Sonnets by 1589, and that Shakespeare’s power had reached maturity by the time he was no more than twenty-five years old. Yet strictly speaking he was still a beginner. Now at length we see he is quite literal in writing in Sonnet 16 of his “pupil pen.”

We have long imagined that Shakespeare “followed the vogue of sonnet-writing.” Hounding out a series of sonnets as a young man in 1589, we find him on the contrary setting rather than following the fashion, and outdoing the lamented leader, Sir Philip Sidney.

Other carefully fabricated structures of theory about Shakespeare’s development as a poet must now be drastically altered. For example, Venus and Adonis and Lucrece were published in 1593 and 1594, and one of the articles of Shakespearean faith has been that they are “more youthful work” than the Sonnets. What shall we say now?

We need not adopt Hazlitt’s description of these two narrative poems as a “couple of ice-houses" to recognize their striking inferiority to the profound and masterly work Shakespeare had already achieved four or live years earlier in his unpublished “Sonnets among his private friends.” But how to account for it? The answer must lie in the sort of market for which they were prepared, Venus and Lucrece were the very stuff required to please the sophisticated taste of the wealthy patron to whom they were offered: that vain, fantastical, amorous, and hare-brained young sprout of the New Nobility, Southampton. As such they were a notable success; for the enthusiastic Gullies of the age exclaimed, “Let this duncified worlde csteemc of Spencer and Chaucer, I’le worshipp sweet Mr. Shakspeare, and to honoure him will lay his Venus and Adonis under my pllowe.” But to peer into them for guideposts to Shakespeare’s “development ” is to look for what is not there.

And the poet’s fair friend? What have our discoveries done with him? In Sonnet 104 Shakespeare tells us that he has known him for three years. If that disclosure belongs to 1589, the acquaintance was formed in 1586, when the poet was twenty-two. We may now assume that he had already begun his stage career by that date; and the marvelous poetic accomplishment growing out of the young player’s friendship with “ W. H.” at last gives us work of the highest importance to put into the so-called “lost years” of his life between 1585 and 1592.

As for the Dark Lady, we can now put her back where she belongs — with the mistresses of Jack Donne — in the poet’s youth.

What must we now say of the noble candidates who have so long been pushed forward for the role of the young friend, “Mr. W. h.”—the Earls of Pembroke and of Southampton? In 1586 Pembroke was, alas, but six years old. Under the circumstances he may be allowed to withdraw. And as for Southampton, late in the same year he began his second academic year at Cambridge and achieved his thirteenth birthday. This would make him all of sixteen when Shakespeare was finishing his Sonnets. Hardly as yet a man who has “pass’d by the ambush of young days,” or one who at the outset of the Sonnets must be urged to marry and beget a son before it is too late. It looks as though we should have to give up Southampton too.

This is a welcome relief. How could anyone seriously expect us to believe that the publisher’s dedication of 1609 to “the onlie begetter of these insuing sonnets” as “Mr. W, H.” could possibly be taken as addressed to a right honorable peer of the realm? Not even a left-wing publisher of today would be guilty of so glaring a breach of manners. And for a Jacobean publisher, seeking a gift of money from the dedicatee — utterly unthinkable. It is high time to lay away the Cinderella story about Shakespeare’s imaginary intimacies with the nobility. To tell the truth, it was an ignorant fancy gotten by Bardolater out of Snobbery.

With the earls cleared away, we perhaps begin to see that if “Mr. W. H.” means anything, it means what it undoubtedly meant in 1609: a gentleman or an esquire with those initials, generally known as the friend of Shakespeare, who as a youth, some twenty-odd years earlier, inspired the writing of the Sonnets. Need I add that I am grooming a candidate for this position? Hut to propose him here would be premature, and make a tale too long for these pages.