CHAPTER TWO
1590-1603 “THE SWEETE WITTIE SOULE OF OVID”
If [the sonnets] descend to what they descend, they
[also] ascend to what they ascend, and who knows
quite what the body of them is; as, for instance, if
these or those are not [just] exercises on a rainy afternoon
in a country-house?
 
—J. A. CHAPMAN, Essays, 1943
 
 
It is not just the cryptic dedication to that precious first edition of Shake-speares Sonnets which provides compelling evidence for its unauthorized, nay piratical, status. We also have to consider the existence of some, if not all, of its contents in manuscript form in London literary circles more than a decade earlier, at the height of what might be termed the Elizabethan sonnet fad.
For once, thanks to a reliable paper trail, we have something more than speculation with which to work. Perhaps the most fabled, and indubitably the most important, contemporary published reference to Shakespeare as both playwright and poet, comes in Francis Meres’s Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasury (1598). Aside from naming (and therefore helping to date) twelve of the plays, Meres refers to how “the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous and hony-tongued Shakespeare, witness his Venus & Adonis, his Lucrece, [and] his sugred Sonnets among his private friends, &c.”
How literally Meres intended to convey the idea that Shakespeare was an English reincarnation of Ovid, this solitary sentence fails to reveal. There is certainly no shortage of Ovidian sentiment, or reasoning, in these poems, but it was a large part of Meres’s general thesis that his English contemporaries had as much to offer as classical authors.
Nor is Meres done with making comparisons. In a later paragraph from the same section of his treasury, comparing (near) contemporary English poets with those from a more exotic past, he elected to place Shakespeare in exalted company—alongside the Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Walter Raleigh, and fellow sonneteer Samuel Daniel—as one of those “most passionate among us to bewail and bemoan the perplexities of Love.” Such a tantalizing description sounds particularly apposite if Meres had in mind the so-called Dark Lady sonnets (Q127-52), which appear to portray a love triangle riddled with guilt, lust, and betrayal—the “perplexities of Love” writ large.
Sadly, Meres does not provide any example of these “sugred Sonnets,” just as he fails to reveal the identity of the “lost” Shakespeare play he name-checks, Love Labours Won (for which my personal candidate would be As You Like It). He also fails to reveal whether he arrived at any of his knowledge of Shakespeare’s poetic output firsthand—i.e., if he was “among [the poet’s] private friends” honored with a copy or loan thereof. But he was assuredly moving in London literary circles in the period 1597-98, before retiring to the country and the life of a rectorschoolmaster by 1602. He may even have had Shakespeare’s blessing when he inserted the reference to these unpublished poems in his own book, in order to engender interest from a publisher or demand from lovers of Venus and Lucrece for their eventual publication in a form as exact and as popular as those more formal poems.
(It doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone in the past four centuries that Thorpe might have approached Meres directly, at a later date, to see if he had retained a copy of the very sonnets he describes, and would be willing to part with them for a consideration. Thorpe already had a reputation as a “procurer of manuscripts” by the time he acquired the Sonnets. If he actively acquired, as opposed to merely chanced upon, these prized specimens of the sonnet-form, Meres would have been a logical starting-point, provided his whereabouts were known. As a literary man, he could have been known to a number of London booksellers even from his remote Rutland rectorship. And as we know, Thorpe was both a collector and a publisher with strong literary interests, albeit unaligned to any real business acumen.)
But, again, mere speculation. Suffice to say, Francis Meres’s mention must have excited some interest in a set of unpublished poems from the author of two highly successful epic poems published earlier in the decade. Indeed, at least one London publisher who now went in search of Shakespearean sonnets came up trumps in a matter of months, publishing a collection that purported to contain some twenty of Shakespeare’s lyrics—of which nine are in conventional sonnet-form—the following year.
The slim volume, entitled The Passionate Pilgrim, “printed for W[illiam] Jaggard . . . to be sold . . . at the Greyhound in [St.] Paules Churchyard,” was unambiguously credited to “W. Shakespeare”—and him alone—on the title page. It proved popular enough to undergo two editions in or around 1599, before being republished in revised form in 1612, three years after two of its poems had reappeared in Thorpe’s collection (Q138, 144).
Once again, we are back in the murky world of Elizabethan book-publishing, in which any member of the Stationers’ Company could publish without “permission” the literary output of any writer careless with his “foul papers”; and even, if he saw fit, to attribute the work of one writer to another, without any real recompense or recourse available to the writers involved. A publisher called Richard Jones, hoping to cash in on the ongoing popularity of Tottel’s Miscellany, had presented another poetical miscellany as a single-author collection, Britton’s Bowre of Delights, back in 1592, and though the wronged Nicholas Breton complained loud and long in The Pilgrimage to Paradise, the following year, he failed to have the book recalled.
So Shakespeare had hardly been singled out when someone like William Jaggard attributed The Passionate Pilgrim to him without establishing whether he, as a “name” author, was actually responsible for the majority—let alone the entirety—of its contents. Of the twenty poems contained therein, just five can be attributed to Shakespeare with any degree of certainty; and of those, three were “manufactured” sonnets, transposed from their true context, in Love’s Labours Lost. Yet Shakespeare decided not to go down the Breton route—at least, not for a while. Perhaps he was relieved to find Jaggard had accessed so few “sugred sonnets.” Or took the forward-thinking view that there was no such thing as bad publicity.
Among these ditties of dubious provenance can be found “drafts” of sonnets 138 and 144 (as they appear in the 1609 quarto), providing much-needed evidence that at least some of the sonnets Thorpe published in 1609 relate to those alluded to back in 1598. Though both sonnets are from the so-called “Dark Lady” section of Q, in the case of Sonnet 144, Shakespeare contrasts the female demon that taunts him with a male guiding light who, within the wider context provided by Thorpe, has been presumed to be the same figure frequenting so many of the “earlier” sonnets:
Two loves I have, of Comfort and Despaire,
That like two Spirits, do suggest me still:
My better Angell, is a Man (right faire)
My worser spirit a Woman (colour’d ill).
To win me soone to hell, my Female evill
Tempteth my better Angell from my side:
And would corrupt my Saint to be a Divell,
Wooing his puritie with her faire pride.
And whether that my Angell be turnde feend,
Suspect I may (yet not directly tell:)
For being both to me: both, to each friend,
I guess one Angell in anothers hell:
The truth I shall not know, but live in dout,
Till my bad Angell fire my good one out.
The implication, adopted wholesale by advocates of at least one earl—though not one borne out by any credible chronology of composition—is that both sequences were fully realized by the time Jaggard found his hoard. Certainly, as of 1599, elements of at least one Shakespearean sonnet-sequence were in a form that suggests they had been reworked, before or after being passed “among . . . private friends.” The other Q sonnet, as published by Jaggard, runs as follows:
When my Love sweares that she is made of truth,
I do beleeve her (though I know she lies)
That she might thinke me some untuter’d youth,
Unskilful in the worlds false forgeries.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinkes me young,
Although I know my yeares be past the best:
I smiling, credite her false speaking toung,
Outfacing faults in love, with loves ill rest.
But wherefore sayes my love that she is young?
And wherefore say not I, that I am old:
O, Loves best habit’s in a soothing toung,
And Age in love, loves not to have yeares told.
Therefore I’le lye with Love, and love with me,
Since that our faultes in love thus smother’d be.
(The versions in The Passionate Pilgrim of Q138 and 144 are marginally clearer than those preferred by Thorpe, though Paul Kerrigan and Katherine Duncan-Jones, in their 1986 and 1997 editions, respectively, seem convinced that they come from memorized transcripts. In the case of 144, two typos in Q—“sight” for “side” [144.6] and “finde” for “fiend” [144.9]—are given correctly in P.P., which makes it unlikely that the differences are solely down to being “transmitted through memorization.”)
Yet one should be wary of leaping to the conclusion that “the Q sequence” was complete by the date Jaggard acquired his poetic prize, just because these numerically late sonnets were circulating in the 1590s. For the idea that the 154 sonnets constitute one sustained sonnet-sequence is essentially an invention of posterity, beholden to the order in which Thorpe published them, which may or may not represent the order in which Shakespeare conceived of them.
In fact, there is some evidence that any sequence (and attendant conceit) imposed on the sonnets may have been an authorial afterthought. As Gary Taylor observed, in his 1983 study of the extant seventeenth-century manuscripts of specific sonnets, “The Passionate Pilgrim . . . contains only two sonnets present in the 1609 sequence. Since the compiler of The Passionate Pilgrim obviously wished to capitalize on Shakespeare’s reputation, he had every reason to reproduce as many sonnets as he could acquire, and it therefore seems obvious that 138 and 144 were circulating separately from any other sonnets yet composed. Cumulatively, the testimony of the extant [seventeenth-century] manuscripts and The Passionate Pilgrim strongly encourages the conclusion that the sonnets circulated in manuscript individually, not as a sequence.”
Taylor overstates his case. He was subsequently challenged by Arthur Marotti, who, “while agreeing with [his] contention that the sonnets circulated in manuscript in a form other than that of the whole collection found in the 1609 Quarto, [thought] it unlikely that single poems were passed about, given . . . the ways that paper was used in this period. . . . [Rather] the uncollected sonnets were either circulated in small sets or groups of poems, passed about in commonplace-book collections, or transmitted through memorization.” Marotti has a point, especially as the price of a quire (approximately two dozen sheets) of writing paper at the beginning of the seventeenth century was between 4d. and 5d., with ruled paper double that price, such paper invariably being acquired in quires, not in single leaves.
Taylor himself was aiming to demonstrate that a particular sonnet from the “first” sequence (Q2) circulated “individually, not as [part of] a sequence.” Not surprisingly, he preferred to overlook the possibility that Jaggard may have acquired other sonnets from the same sequence, but chose not to publish them because they were unduly concerned with the perversities of love. After all, his compendium wholly comprises light, breezy dispositions on the “perplexities” of heterosexual love.
What evidence has survived argues against the entire Shakespearean sonnet-sequence(s) “circulating” in manuscript form during the 1590s, leaving us unable to definitively place the contents of Q in the decade when such sonnet-sequences ruled the Elizabethan literary landscape. Yet the themes that dominate 152 of the 154 sonnets in Q were surely established within this specific conflux of opportunity and interest.
And it would seem that at least one of the so-called “marriage” sonnets quickly passed into discreet circulation, as Taylor has ably demonstrated, using thirteen surviving manuscript copies of Q2 (“When fortie Winters shall beseige thy brow”) dating from the first half of the seventeenth century. Making a textual comparison of all thirteen manuscripts, he showed that eleven of these versions almost certainly derived from a single copy, which was significantly different from the version Thorpe published. And, in Taylor’s opinion, this manuscript version was itself a pre-Q source:
SPES ALTERA
When forty winters shall beseige thy brow
And trench deepe furrowes in yt lovely feild
Thy youthes faire Liu’rie so accounted now
Shall bee like rotten weeds of no worth held
Then beeing askt where all thy bewty lyes
Where all ye lustre of thy youthfull dayes
To say within these hollow suncken eyes
Were an all-eaten truth, 005worthless prayse
O how much better were thy bewtyes vse
If thou coudst say this pretty child of mine
Saues my account 006makes my old excuse
Making this bewty by succession thin
This were to bee new borne when thou art old
And see thy bloud warme when thou feelst it cold.
Q2
When fortie Winters shall beseige thy brow,
And digge deep trenches in thy beauties field,
Thy youthes proud liuery so gaz’d on now,
Wil be a totter’d weed of smal worth held:
Then being askt, where all thy beautie lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty daies;
To say within thine owne deepe sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame, and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deseru’d thy beauties vse,
If thou couldst answere this faire child of mine
Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse
Proouing his beautie by succession thine.
This were to be new made when thou art ould,
And see thy blood warme when thou feel’st it could.
Taylor’s extrapolated version from eleven manuscripts appears to confirm that even a sonnet from the marriage sequence (1-17), the only part of Q that is self-evidently an integrated unit, probably circulated independently. And it had a title, as well. “Spes Altera”—a reference to the line in Virgil’s Aeneid in which Ascanius is called magnae spes altera Romae (“second hope of great Rome”)—appears in four codependent manuscripts, and, as Taylor observes, “A copyist is most unlikely to invent a title like ‘Spes Altera,’ which . . . to my knowledge is not used elsewhere as an epigraph or motto or title in this period.” But it was precisely the kind of reference a young literary figure still making his way in the cutthroat world of London, and with a slight inferiority complex, might introduce to demonstrate that his grammar-school education had not been entirely wasted, and that he knew more than “a little Latin.”
Q2 appears to have been singled out for a particular type of discreet circulation. No other marriage sonnet achieved a similarly robust second life, being passed from hand to hand in manuscript until finding its way into Jacobean and Caroline commonplace books—though a single seventeenth-century manuscript of another resides at the British Library: Sonnet 8, “Musick to heare . . . ”—which may have enjoyed a similar private dissemination but struck far less of a chord with contemporary compilers of manuscript miscellanies.
The “procreation” theme explored in Q2 (and Q8) was one familiar to Elizabethans, and evidently a popular one. Thomas Wilson’s familiar textbook, The Arte of Rhetorique, revised in 1560, translated an epistle from Erasmus “to perswade a young gentleman to Mariage,” providing a direct source for the second sonnet that the literary-minded would have readily recognized: “What man can be greeved that he is old, when he seeth his owne countenance . . . to appeare lively in his sonne? You shall have a pretie little boie, running up and doune your house, soche a one as shall express your loke, and your wives look . . . by whom you shall seme to bee newe borne.”
Such a theme would have been especially poignant to a poet still grieving for his dead son, as Shakespeare would have been if—as I am about to suggest—the sonnet dates from shortly after Hannet Shakespeare, just eleven years old, was buried in August 1596. Yet the fact that these sonnets did not appear in Passionate Pilgrim suggests that they did not feature in any miscellany or commonplace book that entered Jaggard’s clutches, which rather suggests they circulated independent of Q138 and 144 (and/or that any scribal replication occurred after Jaggard had committed himself to publishing the poems he had chanced upon).
Perhaps they were among a set of poems earmarked for a collection cryptically registered for publication in January 1600, as “A booke called Amours by J.D. with certain other sonnetes by W.S.” Katherine Duncan-Jones argues, in her Arden edition, that “J.D.” was probably Sir John Davies. In which case, the sonneteer “W.S.” is just as likely to have been Shakespeare as Sidney Lee’s preferred candidate, William Smith (offered by Lee even though he considered one of Davies’ “gulling sonnets” a parody of Shakespeare’s legal phraseology in Q26).
All of which—as and when possibilities revert to probabilities, and perchance becomes an absolute—could well suggest there were other Shakespearean sonnets waiting to be harvested. Coming from someone in whom “the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives,” these could have complemented some of Davies’ own satirical sonnets, or even a new translation of Ovid’s Amores. Duncan-Jones overstretches, though, when she goes on to suggest that Shakespeare might have “prepared some sonnets for publication early in 1600 motivated by a desire to put right Jaggard’s damaging misappropriation and misidentification of his work.” There is absolutely no evidence that Jaggard’s book “damaged” Shakespeare’s reputation (the fact there were two editions close together tends to suggest the reverse).
It seems more likely that these “certain other sonnetes”—if they were Shakespeare’s, and not some other W.S.’s—were among those that ultimately appeared in Q. As to why they were not published “authoritatively” at this time, the reason cannot have been a purely commercial one. A collection of sonnets from the author of Venus 007Adonis and Lucrece would, on the face of it, have been a valuable commodity; a fact Jaggard fully recognized when he republished The Passionate Pilgrim with a new subtitle, Or, Certaine Amorous Sonnets, betweene Venus and Adonis.
Yet, Shakespeare continued to leave the sonnets in manuscript—both those “sugred Sonnets [found] among his private friends” and others, perhaps including these “certain other sonnetes.” Not that there was anything peculiar, or even original, about such a decision. Sir Philip Sidney’s 108-sonnet sequence, Astrophil 008Stella, had been circulated among friends since some time before his death in 1586, but it was not until “a publishing adventurer,” Thomas Newman, published the sequence, along with “sundry other rare sonnets by divers noblemen and gentlemen,” in 1591, that the form enveloped the Elizabethan literati and would not let go till every able-bodied poet(aster) had demonstrated dexterity with what the French preferred to call a quatorzain.
Whatever Shakespeare’s intentions regarding such sonnets, there can be little doubt that any publication of the main sonnet-sequence (Q18-126) at this stage in his career would have opened him to possible charges of pederasty—still an offence technically punishable by death, as per Leviticus, and a charge Marlowe narrowly avoided by getting himself killed. Likewise, the numerous references to a noble patron that litter these letters-versified would surely have required a visit by Shakespeare to the Privy Council, at the very least, to explain himself. There was a specific offence—scandalum magnatum—when it came to the libeling of peers.
That the censors of books took their duties seriously is evidenced by the events of June 1, 1599, when the Bishop of London notified the masters and wardens “that all books by [Thomas] Nashe . . . be taken and never printed hereafter” for “containing matter unfit to be published.” And if the J.D. of the 1600 Amours was Sir John Davies, then he now knew just how draconian and arbitrary the church’s powers could be. As did the “W.S.” who featured in a long poem called Willobie His Avisa, registered in September 1594, and involving a virtuous lady, Avisa; the tortured lover, H.W.; and his “familiar friend W.S.” Both Davies’ Epigrammes and Elegies and the anonymous Willobie His Avisa were among the “scurrilous and libellous works” ordered to be burned by the bishop, along with “all books by Nashe.”
Presumed by many to be an allegorical version of some minor literary scandal—and subsequently seized on by optimistic Southamptonites as a depiction of the Dark Lady’s duplicitous affairs with a playwright and Fair Youth—the belated condemnation of Willobie His Avisa does rather suggest there was “some element of scandal in the poem” [EKC]. Yet no contemporary ever connected the two W.S.’s, even though the poem continued to enjoy a healthy reputation and print-life throughout the first half of the seventeenth century—unlike the Sonnets.
Sir John Davies, one of those sonneteers who liked to have a little fun at other sonneteers’ expense, wrote his infamous Gulling Sonnets around 1594 and, like Shakespeare, chose to circulate them in manuscript only (in Davies’ case, it would be 1873 before they made it to the printing press!). The satirical vein struck by Davies and—on occasion—Shakespeare in their respective sonnets could suggest a joint plan to rain scorn down on their more sentimental fellow sonneteers.
Given the general literary context in which such sequences might have been composed, and the elusive personal circumstances of the Stratford poet, one productive path has been opened up by recognizing a satirical streak running through parts of Q. The object of such satire seems to be the sonnet-craze itself, suggesting said sonnets were written either just before or shortly after the fad burnt itself out. To satirize a discredited form would be a pretty redundant exercise; and to satirize a form that had as yet a handful of proponents and very little press—as was the case before publication of Sidney’s Astrophil 009Stella and Daniel’s Delia, in 1591 and 1592, respectively—equally pointless.
But surely if Shakespeare was tempted to find mirth at the sonnet-form’s expense, would it not be reflected in the plays of the period? It is. In Love’s Labours Lost—which probably premiered circa 1595-96, and appears in a “bad” quarto edition in 1598—the characters fall in love at the drop of a hat, and when they do, they write sonnets. Even the title seems to be a play on something one of Shakespeare’s near-contemporaries, John Florio, wrote in First Fruits (1578): “We need not speak so much of love, all books are full of love; with so many authors, that it were labour lost to speak of love.”
Lee correctly recognizes “another conceit which Shakespeare develops persistently, in almost identical language, in both the sonnets and Love’s Labours Lost . . . that the eye is the sole source of love, the exclusive home of beauty.” And, like the sonnets themselves, Love’s Labours Lost incorporates what Katharine M. Wilson calls “gradually deepening layers of meaning. It begins with parodying sonnet attitudes; [then] widens to include all sorts of ridiculous fashions in language study and usage.”
Love’s Labours Lost contains four “sonnets” of its own, three of which subsequently appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim, albeit with enough verbal differences to suggest that Jaggard “printed stray copies which were circulating ‘privately,’ and did not find the lines in the printed quartos of the play” [SL]. In the context of the play, these sonnets are clearly satirical—less so in Jaggardian isolation. But the possibility, voiced by Lee, that they circulated independently, alongside other sonnets from Q, suggests a willingness on the author’s part to lampoon his own conceit(s) to a more rarefied audience than the one which frequented the theaters.
After all, few contemporaries would have failed to notice the resemblance between the opening of the so-called fourth Dark Lady sonnet, Q130, and expressions like “thine eye’s bright sun,” a Petrarchian image Samuel Daniel used in Delia; or “Her sparkling eies in heav’n a place deserve,” from the seventh “Passion” of Thomas Watson’s Passionate Centurie of Love. Such a subtext a side-by-side comparison with Watson’s own sonnet amply demonstrates (the original line numbers appear in brackets for the Watson poem; see note for full text):2
010
And yet, as Paul Kerrigan suggests in the 1986 Penguin edition of Q, “Some of the metaphors satirized in Sonnet 130 were used of the young man in earlier [sic] poems” in Q—the populist poet again demonstrating a rare capacity for mocking his own folly. Or, to fleetingly impose the auteur on lines delivered by one particular character in Love’s Labours Lost, “By heaven, I do love, and it hath taught me to rhyme / And to be melancholy.” Some have, not unreasonably, adduced that the Dark Lady’s spirit infuses the entire play, citing Biron’s verbal portrait of Rosalind:
O, if in black my lady’s brows be decked,
It mourns that painting and usurping hair
Should ravish doters with a false aspect,
And therefore is she born to make black fair.
(It would be equally hard to overlook the parallel between “from thine eyes my knowledge I derive” (Q14.9) and a line in Act IV, Scene 3, of Love’s Labours Lost: “From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive.”)
Shakespeare, bound as he was by popular tastes, artistically and financially, found himself obliged to reconcile opposite impulses—playing to them, while simultaneously sending them up. He certainly never modified his mordant view on popular expressions of lovelorn melancholia. Hence, Ophelia’s snatches of song signifying her slide toward suicide, or, more whimsically, the scene in The Winter’s Tale where Autolycus offers to sing “another ballad, of a fish that appeared . . . forty thousand fathoms above water, and sung this ballad against the hard hearts of maids. . . . The ballad is very pitiful, and as true.”
But the element of satire in both Love’s Labours Lost and the sonnets is simply that, and though I suspect Shakespeare began writing sonnets with a view to satirizing his contemporaries and providing comedic value, in plays and/or to amuse friends, there is no way he wrote all 154 sonnets in Q with such a lightweight purpose. The geneses of this particular play and these poems may be contemporaneous, but the poems do not operate as a single narrative; while any satirical intent in Q strikes me as essentially confined to the Dark Lady material.
Even if the positioning of the first 126 sonnets, the so-called “Fair Youth” sequence, reflects some kind of authorial intent—i.e., they appeared in (much) this order in the manuscript, and Thorpe decided not to second-guess his material—how they relate to the Dark Lady sonnets is not clear. A possible link with one of the plays, though, might provide a chronological end-bracket to these other poems. Q126—widely regarded as the “envoi” to the Fair Youth poems—uses the word “Quietus,” meaning final settlement, an expression appearing just once in a Shakespeare play: “When he himself might his quietus make / With a bare bodkin?” (Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1, line 77). The final couplet of 126 reads: “Her [i.e., Time’s] audit, though delayed, answered must be / And her quietus is to render thee.” It is such a startling word to utilize at the end of a sonnet that one is tempted to view these usages as sharing a common conception. But even accepting such a premise would not provide us with a precise chronology—the play could have been composed at any point between 1599 and its July 1602 registration.
Hence, one of the problems of using such a “key word” approach. Not that this stopped A. Kent Hieatt, Charles W. Hieatt, and Anne Lake Prescott from conducting an experiment, running a study of rare word occurrences in the Sonnets. They designated certain rare words as either early (ERW), 1590s, or late (LRW), i.e., post-1600, and published their conclusions in the PMLA in 1991. Those conclusions, summarized by James Schiffer, were “that Shakespeare composed sonnets 1-60 in the first five years of the 1590s and then revised many of them after the turn of the century; sonnets 61-103 . . . were also composed early, but received ‘little or no revision’; [whereas] sonnets 104-26 were probably composed around 1600.” They also assigned sonnets 127-54 to “the first half of the 1590s” . . . but judged that they “were probably not revised.”
However, the trio’s choice of “early plays” from which they drew sample ERW words was almost immediately questioned, while the slightly arbitrary divisions in the Fair Youth sequence (at 60 and 103) rendered their conclusions regarding the sequence as a whole hard to embrace. At least their conclusions about the Dark Lady sonnets made some kind of sense within the context of Q.
A perceived lack of revision among the so-called Dark Lady sonnets (127-54) seems mirrored by a similar lack of any discernible pattern of organization. J.W. Mackail found a marked contrast with what comes earlier in Q, such that, “while in [his] opinion Sonnets 1 to 126 are a continuous, ordered and authentic collection, 127-54 are a miscellaneous and disordered appendix.” Arthur Marotti goes further, supposing that, “if some of the 154 sonnets of the 1609 Quarto circulated in manuscript in the 1590s . . . they were more likely to have been those from the ‘dark lady’ section of the collection . . . as [these] verse [are] lacking the social exclusiveness of the more private encomiastic sonnets to the young man.”
In other words, Thorpe could well have “unwittingly” added this “miscellaneous and disordered appendix,” which came to him in its original, untreated form, to a consistent, coherent sequence. This might also explain why so many of the ideas imperfectly expressed in said appendix are reworked, with greater diligence, in the “core” sequence (the relationship between Q40-42 and the Dark Lady sonnets has been a starting point for many a sonnet “reorderer”). Like a modern bootlegger, who has stumbled upon assorted studio tapes of some well-known rock band, the Jacobean publisher perhaps failed to distinguish between the finished and the fatally flawed, between work intended for a public, and an abandoned notion never fully realized.
The notion that the bulk of the Fair Youth sonnets were revised shortly “after the turn of the century” (contemporaneous with a series of freshly composed sonnets?) accords with an authorial intention repeatedly expressed in the sonnets themselves—specifically Q18, 19, 55, 60, 63, 74, 81, 101, 107—to ensure that these poems were passed on to posterity. Of the half a dozen sonnets devoted wholly to this theme, perhaps the most revealing in terms of authorial intent is Q55, in which Shakespeare tells the reader he is reserving all the fame attendant to “this powerful rhyme” to the “Fair Youth” who has “cast the glamour over him,” leaving none for himself:
Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this pow’rful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmear’d with sluttish time.
Here Shakespeare has composed an entire sonnet emulating the Ovid of Metamorphoses. Specifically, he is alluding to the fifteenth book’s epilogue, where the Roman, at the end of his arduous endeavors, finally bangs his own drum. Ovid is convinced that his own name shall live on as a result of his own powerful, not to say protracted, rhyme. And live on it did, albeit to Elizabethans in the 1567 Arthur Golding translation to which Shakespeare generally referred:
Let comme that fatall howre
Which (saving of this brittle flesh) hath over mee no powre,
And at his pleasure make an end of myne uncerteyne tyme.
Yit shall the better part of mee assured bee too clyme
Aloft above the starry skye. And all the world shall never
Be able to quench my name . . .
My lyfe shall everlastingly bee lengthened still by fame.
Shakespeare conceives of a different kind of immortality, a self-effacing kind that memorializes the subject of his verses, not their creator. In Q81, he actually states that the verses will endure as long as Ovid’s, “such vertue hath my Pen”—though not the name of the writer responsible: “I (once gone) to all the world must dye / . . . [But] your monument shall be my gentle verse.” Meanwhile, in Sonnet 18, it is his “love” that “shall in my verse ever live young”; in Q60, this “verse” that “shall stand / Praising thy worth”; “His beautie,” in Q63, that “shall in these blacke lines be seene”; and, most Ovidian of all, “thou in this shalt finde thy monument” (Q107).
All of these internal boasts, a repeating feature of the Fair Youth sequence, contain that extraordinary combination of poetic bravado and self-effacement which could come only from a man who wrote plays for the ages, and then left not a single play behind in what might be termed an “authorial text.” Not that his attitude would have seemed so strange to a Jacobethan, for whom “the very concept of individual authorship in the Renaissance was a relative one . . . a large part of education [being] devoted to the practise of imitation, both of manner and of matter” [HRW].
What the poet is alluding to in the “immortality” sonnets, and perhaps envisaging by his actions, is a sequence that would, in the fullness of time, replicate the fate of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil 011Stella, published posthumously when the personalities were “food for worms”; for, not only did Sidney’s muse, Penelope Rich, a courtier’s wife, duly end up immortalized in verse, but the knight’s work served as a model for Shakespeare’s own sequence in so many ways, not least structurally.
Should Shakespeare have intended such a passage from presentation to print there could be an allusion to the scuppering of this desire in Heminge and Condell’s famous dedication of the First Folio to two noble kinsmen (one of whom has proven to be the most tenacious candidate for “Fair Youth” status). The King’s Men lament the fact that their late friend did “not hav[e] the fate, common with some, to be exequutor to his owne writings.” Are the pair making a subtle dig at those—like Thorpe and Jaggard (the printer of the folio)—who had taken it upon themselves to act as executors before the man had even passed on?
In the case of the sonnets, the internal references imply only that Shakespeare envisaged circulating the poems anonymously—hence, perhaps, “certain other sonnetes by W.S.” This was not an uncommon conceit in a period when notions of authorship were held to be of far less importance than in our post-Romantic world. George Puttenham’s treatise, The Arte of English Poesie (1589), was one important work that came into the printer Richard Field’s hands, “with his bare title without any Authours name or any other ordinarie addresse.” The work was all.
Of course, in order to even release these poems anonymously, Shakespeare would still have had to entrust his original to a copyist. It seems unlikely he would have done this if all he wanted to do was forward it to its “onlie begetter.” But it could have been transcribed for the purpose of presentation. H. R. Woudhuysen describes how such “presentation manuscripts can [generally] be identified by prefaces and dedications . . . [and also] by the care and elaboration of their writing and decoration. . . . Examples of presentation inscriptions, in prose or verse, are common—Chapman, Daniel and Jonson made much use of them.” It seems highly unlikely that such a presentation copy would have made its way to Thorpe during the author’s lifetime, so other copies must have been made, either knowingly or surreptitiously.
Assuming that there was a period of sustained rewriting—and the internal clues are by no means as obtuse as some would like to imagine—such a revision process, directed at Q18-126 specifically, was almost certainly independent of the sonnets’ 1609 appearance. It came about because the poet was preparing the work for dissemination in some suitably anonymous guise—perhaps as W.S.; most likely, initially at least, in manuscript. As I have indicated earlier, there were a number of reasons why he would have considered this course preferable to publication.
What Shakespeare is unlikely to have foreseen was the publication of his carefully structured sonnet-sequence bound up with discarded exercises he had previously passed around, perhaps concerning an earlier affair, as well as a handful of satirical sonnets, and even a couple of questionable rhetorical exercises concerning Cupid, based on an Ovidian text (Q153-54). Nor that a long, tedious narrative poem—by an entirely different poet—would be attributed by Thorpe to him whose pen “hath . . . such vertue.”
Even if the manuscript itself identified only its initialized author and/or recipient, in the time it took for the manuscript to reach Thorpe, the identity of the poet, if not the “onlie begetter,” was made known to the publisher. In the interim, it had probably already passed through the hands of one or more rival poets, as well as a certain Fair Youth.