"SHAKE-SPEARE'S SONNETS. Neuer before Imprinted. AT LONDON By G. Eld, for T. T. and are to be solde by William Aspley. 1609." 4to. 40 leaves. The same. By the same, "and are to be solde by Iohn Wright, dwelling at Christ Church gate. 1609." "A Louer's complaint. By William Shake-speare," is printed at the end of this volume, of which it makes eleven pages. (146) SONNETS. INTRODUCTION. HAKESPEARE'S Sonnets were first printed in 1609 in a SHA small quarto volume, the publisher of which dedicated them to a Mr. W. H., whom he styles their " only begetter." They, or some of them, or possibly some others of Shakespeare's writing, are mentioned in Meres's Palladis Tamia, (which appeared in 1598,) in company with their author's Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, as "his sugred sonnets among his private friends." In only three of them, those numbered 111, 135, and 136, is he unmistakably speaking in his own person, though the first of these seems clearly connected in spirit with its predecessor. As to the motives of the rest we have only that kind of internal evidence which addresses itself to the judgment of the individual reader. They may, or they may not, have been the direct and deliberate expressions of his own feeling; and some of them, as, for instance, the first seventeen, with which the succeeding five seem to be intimately connected, are of such a nature that it is difficult to conjecture why they should have been written by any man. This is all that we know about a collection of more than two thousand verses, second only in importance and in interest to the best dramatic productions of their author. Conjecture has long been busy to discover the purpose of these sonnets, and the person or persons to whom they were addressed. Farmer thought, or, rather, guessed, that they were written to William Hart, the poet's nephew; Tyrwhitt suggested that the line "A man in hue, all Hewes in his controlling" in the twentieth sonnet, indicates William Hughes, or Hews, as their subject; George Chalmers argued that the recipient of the impassioned adulation which pervades so many of them was no other than the virgin Queen Elizabeth herself! Dr. Drake supposed that in "W. H." we have the transposed initials of Henry Wriothesly, Earl of Southampton; and lastly, Mr. Boaden brought forward William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, as the beautiful youth, the dearly loved false friend, whose reluctance to marry, and whose readiness to love lightly the wanton and alluring woman whom the poet loved so deeply, were the occasion of these mysterious and impressive poems. Of these hypotheses, the latter, which alone is worthy of serious consideration, was adopted by Mr. Armitage Brown, and very minutely worked out in his book entitled Shakespeare's Autobiographical Poems. Mr. Brown thinks that Shakespeare used the sonnet form merely as a stanza, and that all his sonnets, exclusive of the last two, (which manifestly have no connection with any others,) were written as six consecutive poems. He thus divides them, and designates their subjects: First Poem. Sonnets 1 to 26. To his friend, persuading him to marry. Second Poem. Sonnets 27 to 55. To his friend, forgiving him for having robbed him of his mistress. Third Poem. Sonnets 56 to 77. To his friend, complaining of his coldness, and warning him of life's decay. Fourth Poem. Sonnets 78 to 101. To his friend, complaining that he prefers another poet's praises, and reproving him for faults that may injure his character. Fifth Poem. Sonnets 102 to 126. To his friend, excusing himself for having been some time silent, and disclaiming the charge of inconstancy. Sixth Poem. infidelity. Sonnets 127 to 152. To his mistress, on her These divisions are merely arbitrary; and all the author's ingenuity has failed to convince me either that the limits which he has drawn exist otherwise than in his imagination, or that the sonnets within those limits are consecutively interdependent. He himself admits that in the sixth poem or division the order of the stanzas or sonnets is confused in the edition of 1609 * A profound German, Herr Barnstorff, and an acute Frenchman, Monsieur Philarete Chasles, have conceived, and even printed, and men of Shakespeare's race have actually discussed, theories upon this subject which I thus allude to only lest some reader might otherwise suppose that they had escaped my notice. - the only one of even quasi authority. That many of the sonnets which were printed together are upon the same subject, or have some connection with each other, is clear enough; but, excepting the first seventeen, (all of which urge a very young man to marry,) continuity of purpose is rarely traceable through more than half a dozen of them in the order in which they were first given to the world. In my opinion they were printed in the first edition much in the sequence in which they were gathered together, with little attention to systematic arrangement; and the consequence is a distracting, and, most probably, a remediless confusion after the twenty-second sonnet, even as to those which have manifestly some connection with each other. The Mr. W. H., to whom these poems are dedicated as their only begetter, could not have been so designated because they were all addressed to him, or because he alone was in any sense their subject or their object. For some of them are addressed to a woman, others to a lad, others to a man; in three Shakespeare speaks unmistakably for himself, and upon subjects purely personal; and the last two are mere fanciful and independent productions. But though it is thus manifest that no one man could have been the only inspirer or occasion of all these sonnets, yet Mr. W. H. could easily have been their only procurer for the purposes of publication, and thus have performed an office which Thomas Thorpe might well have acknowledged by something more substantial than the barren wish which has proved such a riddle to after generations. It is true that two hundred and fifty years ago the word 'beget' was restricted, as it is now, to the expression of the idea of procreation. But this dedication is not written in the common phraseology of its period; it is throughout a piece of affectation and elaborate quaintness, in which the then antiquated prefix 'be' might be expected to occur; beget' being used for 'get,' as Wiclif uses betook' for 'took' in Mark xv. 1-"And ledden him and betoken him to Pilat." Mr. Dyce was the first, I believe, to advance the opinion that most of these sonnets were composed "in an assumed character on different subjects, and at different times." This supposition is in accordance with the custom of Shakespeare's day for poets to write songs and sonnets for the use of those who could not * In his Memoir of Shakespeare prefixed to Pickering's edition of the Poems. |
