CHAPTER EIGHT
1841-2007 “THE DIVISION AND SUMMING OF THE CHAPTERS”
It is a sad day for a man when he becomes entangled . . .
in the problem of the order of Shakespeare’s sonnets.
His happiness is departed; his mind is no longer his
own. He is in the condition of those who set themselves
to work out a system of breaking the bank at
Monte Carlo.
—Times Literary Supplement, NOVEMBER 26, 1925
The division and summing of the Chapters was not of
[the poet’s] doing, but adventured by the over-seer of
the print, for the more ease of the Readers.—WILLIAM PONSONBY, PREFACE TO SIR PHILIP
SIDNEY’S Arcadia, 1590
While a certain breed of Victorian literary bloodhound continued to hunt for external clues as to the identities of the sonnets’ dramatis personae, a different pack of culture-vultures turned to the sonnets themselves, hoping to pick apart evidence that had eluded all previous comers. Increasing in number as the external trail dried up, and as the battle-weary exponents-of-earls called a truce, these unsatiated souls endlessly reexamined the order and contents of Q itself.
The first “disintegrationist” to challenge the order as published was Charles Knight, who in 1841, six decades after Malone, published the sonnets within his eight-volume Pictorial Edition of the Works of Shakspere. As the son of a printer-bookseller, and a former journalist, Knight had set himself up as an independent publisher of almanacs, pictorial histories, and the like. Another of those amateur antiquarians the era effortlessly produced, Knight unambiguously asserted that Q was printed “without the cognizance of the author, [included] all the Sonnets which could be found attributed to Shakspere; [and therefore] some of these formed a group of continuous poems . . . some were detached . . . [but only] accident has arranged them in the form in which they first were handed down to us.”
It was a necessary challenge to contemporary thinking, which had settled on Malone’s implicit acceptance of Q as largely, if accidentally, authoritative. This Knight of the realm demanded an altogether more critical approach to the text as published. And though he refrained from printing the sonnets in the order he supposed correct, sticking to Q, his “preferred” order printed as an appendix represented a radical reorganization of Thorpe’s, beginning with Q105-24, and ending with the very sonnet that began the Fair Youth sequence, Q18.
Compiling this edition when he was just starting his own, somewhat fanciful life of “Shakspere,” Knight refrained from applying names and dates to his narrative, but nonetheless assigned most of the Fair Youth sonnets to a category he called “Confiding Friendship.” He also, as Rollins wrote, “started a game that promises never to end. If our wives do not write novels . . . they are likely on no provocation at all to malarrange Shakespeare’s lyrics.”
Of the Victorian Shakespeareans, ladies and gentlemen alike, who examined the contents of Q anew, few followed Knight in addressing the history of Q itself. Most simply took up where Knight left off, dispensing with Thorpe’s order in its entirety. Victor Hugo—who in his 1857 French translation recast the sonnets into seven parts to “reveal” a scandal involving Southampton, Shakespeare, and a married woman—accused Thorpe of being complicit in a conscious attempt to disguise the “real” story.
It was almost invariably Southamptonites who wanted to disintegrate Q, attempting, in Archer’s choice phrase, “to explain away an improbability” through the art of reorganization. Of these, perhaps the most persistent was Gerald Massey, who divided the sonnets in his 1866 edition into twenty-five sections, primarily concerned with the relationships of Southampton, Elizabeth Vernon, and Shakespeare, save for the Dark Lady sonnets, which apparently addressed William Herbert’s passion for Lady Rich! Six years later, Massey republished his edition with a new, snappier title, The Secret Drama of Shakespeare’s Sonnets Unfolded, with the Characters Identified. But by 1888 he had rejected his original order, devising a largely new structure that still gave center stage to Southampton.
It took until 1904 for Charlotte Stopes to supersede Massey’s twenty-five divisions. At least her twenty-seven sections, by her own admission, did not pretend “to better Shakespeare, but to find out what he means, and to get behind Thomas Thorpe.” And, like Knight, she only offered her rearrangement as an appendix to her edition of Q. A Southamptonite in sheep’s clothing, she wrapped her categories in generalities (“Personal Affection develops”; “After return sees the Lady”; “Gossip concerning Friend”) that ended, happily, with the “Triumph of Love over Time.”
But if Stopes was almost apologetic about the way she related the sonnets’ internal story to the life of the poet, she was a rare Southamptonite. The year before her edition appeared, Arthur Acheson inflicted the first of his fanciful impositions on events of the Elizabethan era, Shakespeare and the Rival Poet. Over another two decades he honed his theories in the vacuum-sealed world of A. Acheson. By 1922, when he published Shakespeare’s Sonnet Story, 1592-1598, this narrative totalled 676 pages, with a chapter devoted to each of the seven books into which he reorganized the sonnets. His motivation was betrayed by his subtitle: Restoring the Sonnets written to the Earl of Southampton to their original books and correlating them with personal phases of the Plays of the Sonnet period; with documentary evidence identifying Mistress [Anne] Davenant as the Dark Lady.
The oddity of the theory, though, need not directly correlate with the kind of radical reorganization Acheson’s ilk favored. For sheer eccentricity, aligned with unswerving self-assurance, Samuel Butler’s introduction to his 1899 edition, in which he explained how he had memorized the poems, then cut them out of his copy, and rearranged them until he felt he had arrived at “their original order,” probably takes the cookie. And yet Butler’s reorganization of the sonnets themselves was hardly dramatic (1-32 and 63-138 he left entirely alone), believing as he did that Q had “every appearance of having intentionally preserved the order in which the Sonnets were written. . . . For this mercy we should be grateful, for had the order been irrecoverably disturbed the Sonnets would have been a riddle beyond all reading.”
Less intuitive souls preferred to examine the sonnets as published, taking a more measured view, recognizing signs of both order and disorder in Q. Some even saw indications of authorial intent in the way certain sonnets were soldered together by word associations and rhymes. Others proffered the possibility that Thorpe had published the material “faithfully,” but that it came to him already disorganized. Robert Shindler, in an 1892 article, thought he recognized an intermediary process between author and publisher; hence, the “signs of continuity, [with] numbers which clearly stand together, but the breaks and gaps, the omissions and the wrong arrangements, are just as clear. . . . [Because] Thorpe . . . could only print the Sonnets just as they stood in his ms., those that . . . stood together he printed together, and so produced those traces of orderly arrangement which we see.”
Beeching, too, in his intelligent 1904 edition, while generally accepting of the way the sonnets had been organized, suspected “some few are misplaced; 36-39, if they are rightly placed, do not explain their position; 75 would come better after 52; 77 and 81 interrupt the series on the Rival Poet.” And E. K. Chambers concurred with his illustrious predecessor, suggesting, “The unity of the sonnets is [largely] one of atmosphere. The thread of incident is a frail one. Each sonnet is generally self-contained. A few are linked. . . . [But] there is occasionally a jar in the continuity, which may [well] suggest misplacement.”
Another, more troublesome thesis threatened an alternative explanation for such breaks in continuity—the impositions of an impostor. After all, the logical outcome of a critical attitude to the order of Q was to doubt the actual contents of Q—as a fair few already had, casting scorn and doubt on the long narrative that occupied its end-sheets, “A Lover’s Complaint.” Those who began to doubt the authenticity of at least a handful of the sonnets were hardly confined to the outer fringes of Shakespeareans. J. W. Mackail—while mounting a solid case for Shakespeare’s non-authorship of the long poem—threw in another suggestion as a footnote: “[Q]153 and 154 are pretty certainly not by Shakespeare, 128 and 145 are very doubtful, and a plausible case can be made out against 135, 136 and 143.”
In fact, Q153 and 154 have proven particularly problematic to every Shakespearean who favors the order and contents of Q. Both patently derive from an epigram by Marianus Scholasticus, a lawyer poet from the sixth century, that was included in the so-called Palatine Anthology. Concerned with a myth about a sleeping Cupid whose torch is stolen by a virgin nymph, who quenches it in a cold well that becomes imbued with curative properties, the two sonnets—printed as one by Benson—serve as a highly curious coda to the (second) sequence. Malone felt that Shakespeare “hardly could have intended to send them both into the world,” whereas Auden seized on their inclusion as proof of Q’s unauthorized status: “Any writer with an audience in mind knows that a sequence of poems must climax with one of the best. Yet the sequence as we have it concludes with two of the worst of the sonnets, trivial conceits about, apparently, going to Bath to take the waters.”
Even Duncan-Jones was obliged to address the anomalous position of these sonnets. Required to argue that they had been put there at Shakespeare’s behest, she suggests that “several other authors used similar ‘Anacreontic’ [a long-winded synonym for ‘erotic’] verses to divide off their collections of sonnets from the continuous lyric or complaint which followed.” She does not, however, explain why Shakespeare should indulge in such overt repetition. Nor can she explain away the formulaic triteness with which “he” handles the “trivial conceits,” or the lack of any obvious Shakespearean stamp to either lyric. Malone, equally disturbed by the use of “the very same thoughts differently versified,” felt they must have been “early essays of the poet.” Unfortunately for that theory, James Hutton demonstrated in 1941 that the earliest English translation of Scholasticus’s Greek original was in 1603, which would place the poems at the tail-end of any credible composition-date—if they were Shakespeare’s.
Alternatively, these could be stray sonnets, added as an epilogue at the conclusion of the two sonnet-sequences, as Dante Gabriel Rossetti suggested in his Recollections (1882). But if so, they must have been put there by a man with no poetic soul, such as Thomas Thorpe, which again serves to debunk the presumption, made increasingly often, that the 154 sonnets told a story, and that every lyric was part of a greater whole.
In large part, such a thesis was considered desirable because the other great sonnet-sequences of the period had an order to them, even if it was not readily apparent on its original, piratical publication, as was the case with Sidney’s Astrophil & Stella. Indeed, disintegrationists of Q tended to treat Thorpe as another Newman. Yet many of the Elizabethan sonneteers were disintegrators of their own work. Drayton’s Ideas Mirrour went through at least five revisions, and Daniel could not leave Delia alone, try as he might.
The literary legions were attempting to provide Thorpe’s edition with something it appeared to be missing—evidence of the structural sophistication one would have expected of Shakespeare if he had intended to produce a publishable sonnet-sequence. It was this very absence of a clearly delineated order which convinced Auden that “the one hundred and fifty-four sonnets as we have them . . . are not in any kind of planned sequence. The only semblance of order is a division into two unequal heaps.”
There remained something fundamentally unsatisfactory about Thorpe’s sonnet-sequence which no reorganization could sate. Perhaps it was meant to be that way. A lesser poet, Denys Bray, writing between the wars, decided that these seemingly intractable problems bore all the marks of another Jacobethan disintegrationist: “In the end . . . [Shakespeare] broke the chain and disarranged the flowing whole, either in artistic dissatisfaction with it, or, more probably, to ensure that whatever the future had in store, the heart that he had unlocked in his own inner chamber should not lie exposed for daws to peck at.”
Of course, Bray himself still managed to crack the code with a simple phonetic trick—“the mechanical coupling of sonnet to sonnet by rhyme-link.” As a result, he produced his own nine-tiered tower, tottering between “Adoration” (I) and “The Dark Lady” (IX), with intermediate parts that included “Reproaches for the Breaking of a Twofold Truth, Hers and His” and “Triumph of Love over Silence and Separation.” It took E. K. Chambers to point out that Bray’s strict reliance on rhyme-links resulted in the loss of as many links as his method found: “Intent upon his continuous chain of formal links, he has rent asunder many sense-links . . . clearly apparent in Thorpe’s text.”
Thus did the rays of reason reenter the debating hall, but not for long. Chambers had postulated a view, based on the evidence, that pointed to an unauthorized text at least one remove from Shakespeare’s autograph copy(s). And that just wouldn’t do. Nor was Rollins’s titanic compilation of every nuanced notion ever expended on the sonnets, which made up volume two of his 1946 variorum edition, enough to still those who demanded Q be taken at face value. He had argued that “there can be no assurance [Q] represents with any degree of accuracy [the author’s] own classification of the poems. Yet exactly the opposite assumption . . . underlies the arguments of most defenders of the existing order.”
And in 1983, those “defenders of the existing order” found a new champion in the shape of Katherine Duncan-Jones, a Cambridge professor of English with a profound distaste for inconvenient truths. For her, “The origins of the widespread belief that Q is unauthorized lie . . . in deep anxieties felt by British scholars . . . in the aftermath of the infamous ‘Labouchere amendment’ of 1885, which criminalized homosexual acts between consenting adult males.” Actually, the likes of Malone, Hazlitt, and Knight had cast doubt on such a thesis long before Labouchere laid down the law and Wilde got all profound.
Duncan-Jones certainly had her work cut out for her. Not only did she have to rehabilitate the maverick Thorpe, recasting him as a misunderstood lover of literature, but she had to explain away every inconsistency and oddity in the thin quarto of sonnets (and, as we have seen, these were not confined to the mere order in which they were published); the sloppy way the book was produced; and the lack of any authorial preface or dedication. Finally, she had to argue not only that the sequence was Shakespeare’s, but that the long, labored narrative poem that appeared at the end of the volume—which was uncredited on the title page and had no Stationers’ Company registration—was his, too.
Fortunately for this career academic, after a century and a half of disintegration the time seemed right for a spot of revisionist thinking. Rather than arguing about unresolvable issues of happenstance, academics returned to the poems themselves, treating them as an aesthetically satisfying unit of authorial integrity to which the full apparatus of New Criticism could be brought to bear. That it flew in the face of all logic—and the precious few facts—was an issue easily sidestepped with an “op. cit. Duncan-Jones.”
Thus a serious scholar like Helen Vendler—by her own admission “inclined to believe Katherine Duncan-Jones’s argument that the Sonnets may have been an authorized printing”—looking for symmetry in her superbly subjective The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1997), found it. But even she knew that she must construct an explanation for the poems’ “variation in aesthetic success” (or just plain badness). So she suggested “that some sonnets . . . were inserted ad libitum for publication.” Quite how an artist as mature and measured as Shakespeare was in 1609 could have thought two parodic paeans to Cupid would be a good way to round things off, Vendler fails to address.
At least by steering well clear of “A Lover’s Complaint,” Vendler concentrated on a set of unequivocally Shakespearean poems. Duncan-Jones proved less discriminating. Having been commissioned to edit an Arden edition of the sonnets on the back of her disconcertingly influential 1983 article—“Was the 1609 Shake-speares Sonnets Really Unauthorized?”—she elected to include “A Lover’s Complaint.” Her new edition was published ahead of Vendler’s monumental critique.
By the time Duncan-Jones gave her endorsement to this “sensuous poem with an astonishingly complex narrative structure,” the tide had truly turned. Indeed, it was sometimes hard to remember that William Hazlitt, the dean of literary criticism, had proclaimed his doubts about the poem’s authenticity 180 years before this, and that it had been largely disparaged or disregarded ever since. Even when the likes of Lee and Mackail examined the language of this long poem, during the Edwardian Indian summer which ushered in a new age, they found little worth lingering upon.
Lee was utterly dismissive, describing its tone as too conventional, its language strained, while “the far-fetched imagery exaggerates the worst defects of Shakespeare’s Lucrece, [while] a very large number of words which are employed in the poem are found nowhere else in Shakespeare’s work. Some of these seem invented for the occasion to cover incapacity of expression. The attribution . . . to Shakespeare may well be disputed. It was probably . . . circulated like the sonnets in written copies, and was assigned to Shakespeare by an enterprising transcriber.” Two years later, G. W. Hadow similarly struggled to get past “the strangeness of the vocabulary,” and he rejected it from his own edition of the sonnets.
By 1912, J. W. Mackail had decided to examine the poem thoroughly to see if it genuinely bore the stamp of Shakespeare. He forced himself to get beyond his first, damning impression “that this [poem] is highly mannered, and that the mannerism is not daring or even inventive, but rather laboured and tortuous.” His next observation immediately moved the debate forward. “A Lover’s Complaint,” he said, “is not the work of a beginner. Its style, alike in its good and its bad points, is formed and even matured. . . . It is either a work of his later and matured period, or not a work of his at all.” Placing the poem in the seventeenth century put an even greater strain on those who wanted it to be William’s, but it was hard to argue with Mackail’s reasoning (no one on either side of the fence ever has).
Tackling, in order, the vocabulary, syntax, and phrasing of the poem, Mackail posited a thesis disturbing to the poem’s few advocates: “What we do find habitually is a forcing of phrase, which follows a fashion of the period, but follows it as a servant, does not sway it as a master. Sometimes this forcing of phrase appears due to pedantry, to the artificiality of a contracted and ill-digested scholarship; sometimes to mere clumsiness, what Lee aptly calls incapacity of expression.”
Rather than arguing that the poem was simply not “Shakespearean,” Mackail methodically moved toward a thesis that the poem was conceived as self-consciously “Shakespearean” in an act “of what may be called stylistic impersonation.” Unable to reconcile the highs and lows of diction and insight in “A Lover’s Complaint” with an artist at the height of his artistic powers, he decided it was “easier to believe that a rival poet could catch, here and there, some reflection of Shakespeare’s genius, than to believe that Shakespeare would deliberately and with no visible reason write down to the level of a rival’s style.”
It was a brilliant analysis, and—as we saw in Chapter 4—it held the critical consensus for fully fifty years. But, as we know, rarely do things stay in stasis in the world of Shakespearean studies. By 1964-65, it was no longer enough to suggest that “A Lover’s Complaint” was too god-awful to be part of the canon. MacDonald P. Jackson and Kenneth Muir, on opposite sides of the world, set about challenging Mackail’s attribution of the poem to “a rival poet.”
Muir went first, focusing on the “Shakespearean” nature of the poem’s language. But it was New Zealand scholar Jackson who really made the case for this “Complaint” as the work of William—and, in keeping with most Shakespearean scholars who have built their arguments on linguistic quicksand, he did so unequivocally: “The large number of new words, the nature of these coinages, and the many links with the verbal habits of Shakespeare’s middle and late periods point unmistakably to Shakespearian authorship at a date that can scarcely be earlier than 1600.” Even his few qualifications, such as, “I do not for a moment suppose that parallel passages necessarily imply identity of authorship,” are promptly requalified in favor of his thesis: “But the ease with which parallels between ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ and the whole range of the Shakespearean canon may be found makes Shakespeare’s responsibility for the poem the simplest hypothesis.”
No one had told Jackson that the “simplest hypothesis” need not necessarily be the most persuasive. And so Jackson went out of his way to sidestep Mackail’s central conclusion—that the author of “A Lover’s Complaint” was trying to emulate and imitate Shakespeare—even though these “parallel passages” fit his thesis just as easily as they did Jackson’s. Belatedly, Jackson realized this. And so, in 2004, he set out to make a second, more persuasive case for Shakespeare’s authorship, which did address other claimants, and even took account of the publishing history of Q.
In the interim, there had been dissenting voices, albeit ones that were largely drowned out by the considerable clout that Duncan-Jones and Kerrigan carried. In 1992, John Roe described the poem as “a good deal less readable, artistically less assured, than Shakespeare’s other verse narratives,” but still paid lip service to the New Consensus by including it in his Cambridge University Press edition of the Poems.
Meanwhile, nascent technological advances had started to challenge these “authorial” advocates. In 1987, Russian scholar Marina Tarlinskaja had run a series of sophisticated computer tests based on “quantitative prosody,” using the canonical plays and the poems of Shakespeare, and decisively rejected his authorship of the “Complaint.” A decade later, the poem’s diction was again tackled by linguistic technicians Ward Elliott and Robert Valenza, who “applied to the poem a series of stylometric tests which had been validated in previous research into Shakespeare’s poems” [BV]. Fourteen stylometric tests were found to be usable on both the plays and the poems, and none of the 3,000 word blocks of text that were undisputedly Shakespearean failed more than two of them. Most failed none. “A Lover’s Complaint” failed six of them.
It was in such a climate that Jackson set out to restore the poem’s reputation, and his own, in an article for the 2004 Shakespeare Studies (published in the fall of 2003). In the intervening period, presumably under the influence of advocates like John Kerrigan, who in 1991 devoted an entire volume to the poem, Jackson’s opinion of the poem’s qualities had come on in leaps and bounds. Back in 1964, he had owned up to the poem’s “numerous defects” and admitted that the treatment itself was “hackneyed.” Now he thought that, “at its best,” the poem was “very fine.” Not only was the “Complaint” an “adaptation of Shakespeare’s most condensed mature style to nondramatic poetry,” but it had apparently been conceived as “the third movement in a sonata-like structure” within Q, which “preserves Shakespeare’s own arrangement of his sonnets.”
In this brave new world, Jackson used the familiar “op. cit.” to suggest that the debate about Q’s authorized status was all but done and dusted. Recognizing that “a spurious ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ would undermine trust in Thorpe’s volume; [whereas] a Shakespearean ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ tends to authenticate it,” he examined the phraseology of every Jacobethan playwright in the Chadwyck-Healy LiOn (Literature Online) database, with specific emphasis on George Chapman, the one candidate advocated by those who accepted Mackail’s thesis (principally by John Robertson in his 1917 tome, Shakespeare and Chapman: A Thesis on Chapman’s Authorship of ‘A Lover’s Complaint’).
What Jackson found was what he expected to find, that the “phrasal links to plays of 1590-1610 are . . . overwhelmingly with Shakespeare,” at the expense of the likes of Chapman, Jonson, Marston, and Heywood, whose combined score amounted to barely half of Shakespeare’s. Having seemingly closed the door on further debate, Jackson concluded that “unless . . . some alternative candidate . . . shows even more points of contact with the poem . . . Thorpe’s unambiguous ascription should stand.”
But barely had Jackson put down his laptop, when another expert in authorship studies, Professor Brian Vickers, began to voice concerns about Jackson’s methodology. Fresh from flattening another Thorpe-authenticated text fleetingly attributed to Shakespeare (in Counterfeiting Shakespeare: Evidence, Authorship and John Ford’s Funerall Elegye [2001]), Vickers preferred to refer to a different aspect of the same database, English Poetry 900-1900. He was looking for rival poets, not fellow playwrights. Picking three odd words and two peculiar phrases that appear in the “Complaint,” but nowhere (else) in Shakespeare—“maund,” “forbod,” “affectedly,” “rocky heart,” and “fell rage”—he found just one (other) contemporary writer who had used all five expressions: John Davies of Hereford.
As Davies’ entry in the most up-to-date Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) makes clear, this “writing-master” was “one of the most voluminous didactic poets of the age; he was also one of the most tedious.” The idea that he was also the author of “an astonishingly complex narrative structure” like “A Lover’s Complaint” seemed, on the face of it, faintly risible. But, thanks to the magnificent work of the Reverend Alexander Grossart, who had edited a number of subscriber-only volumes of poetry by Shakespeare’s contemporaries in the late Victorian era, Davies’ collected works had been preserved in a two-volume edition (utilized by Chadwyck-Healy); and because Davies was nothing if not prolific, Vickers now had a lot to work with.
Wasting no time, Vickers announced his initial conclusions, and essential thesis, in an article in the Times Literary Supplement in December 2003. He set out to remind his fellow Shakespeareans that the text is the thing, and that “the issue can only be decided on the internal evidence, since the single external witness, Thomas Thorpe, is notoriously unreliable.” A lot more comfortable analyzing the written word than investigating the interactions of the Jacobean literary community, Vickers preferred to posit that “in an age of intense copying and circulating of poetry, manuscripts of Davies’s work could easily have become mixed up with Shakespeare’s.”
Even after previous demolitions of false attributions, Vickers knew that his fellow Shakespearean scholars would take a lot of convincing, especially those with entrenched positions. Professor Duncan-Jones quickly reminded readers of a popular Shakespeare blog[!] that “on the case for the Sonnets as an authorized publication, I first argued for this, with a good deal of evidence [sic], in a longish article in The Review of English Studies as long ago as 1983. I also gave evidence for the inclusion of ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ as a designed part of the whole.” Actually, her entire thesis was tethered to the authenticity of this poem, which she saw as forming “part of the same structural unit as the Sonnets.” It would take a lot more than mere evidence to get a mea culpa here.
It took Vickers until 2007 to fulfill his self-imposed brief, but he finally delivered an impressive 330-page case study in attribution and authorship issues, Shakespeare, A Lover’s Complaint and John Davies of Hereford. His case, though, differed little from the one outlined in the TLS; only the weight of evidence he now summoned to bolster the argument had changed. And he still spent just six pages directly addressing the issue of how the poem had ended up in Q, even though Mackail had thought the problem of attribution intrinsically bound up with “the problem of the Sonnets, and more particularly, that part of the problem which deals with the way in which they reached Thorpe’s hands . . . and the circumstances of their publication.”
Vickers preferred to look at Davies’ chameleon-like capacity to assume other poetic styles, arguing that his “ability to imitate other poets’ voices as easily as he could write many different hands . . . makes it impossible to define his own ‘normal’ verse style.” This was an important part of his thesis because there were no other examples in Davies’ voluminous ouevre of him either attempting a narrative poem in the “female complaint” genre, or using the rhyme-royal favored by Shakespeare.
At his side, he had not just Grossart’s edition of Davies’ work, but also the Victorian prelate’s detailed introduction, in which he championed the relative worth of Davies’ output. Admitting that Davies “occasionally potters among the dust and chaff when he should soar,” Grossart also found “luminous flashes and sudden darts of insight and real ‘singing,’ not saying.” There was one characteristic of this part-time poet that Grossart was especially keen to emphasize: his capacity for “terse, compacted couplets, stanzas, half-stanzas, lines and half-lines, which . . . cleave to the memory.”
Imagery that soars high and sinks low was one characteristic of the “Complaint” that had been drawing comment since the days of Malone and Steevens (the latter explicitly doubted that Shakespeare would use a formulaic phrase like “forme receive” not once, but twice, for the sake of a rhyme [lines 239/41; 306-7]). It was also a concern of Grossart’s friend Algernon Swinburne, the poet, who felt that “A Lover’s Complaint” “contains two of the most exquisitely Shakespearean verses ever vouchsafed to us by Shakespeare, and two of the most execrably euphuistic or dysphuistic lines ever inflicted on us by man.” (Advocates of the poem’s authenticity often quote the former, rarely the latter part of the poet’s critique.)
Swinburne was in the rare position of knowing something of Davies’ works, being among the hundred subscribers to Grossart’s 1878 edition,
15 though he perhaps never made it all the way through the dust and chaff. But he probably made it through his friend’s lengthy Preface, in which the reverend unwittingly highlighted Davies’ tendency to appropriate his imagery from his betters. In quoting one of Davies’ “surpassingly fine and pathetic metaphor[s]”—“my Ship, through Fate’s crosse waue / Now grates vpon the Grauell of my Graue”—Grossart promptly realized that it had already been put to superior use by martyred poet Robert Southwell, in “The full of your spring-tide is now fallen, and the stream of your life waneth to a low ebb; your tired bark beginneth to leak, and grateth oft upon the gravel of the grave.”
This is precisely the kind of “phrasal resemblance”—to use Jackson’s choice phrase—that the “Complaint” poet reapplied to Shakespeare’s plays. Jackson cites a number of them, but one example will suffice. To him, “the grounds and motives of her woe” [line 63] is an irresistible reminder of Hamlet’s words, “the motive and the cue for passion.” Unfortunately, it has none of its acuity. Nor were these phrasal resemblances confined to the plays. Jackson also found parallels in the sonnets themselves, a fact which had led Mackail to suppose, a century ago, “that if the author of ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ was not the author of the sonnets, he had read them, or some of them, when he wrote the poem.” The significance of this supposition, if it could be supported by the facts, was not immediately apparent.
The intractable problem for any advocate of authenticity is the sheer clumsiness with which the author of “A Lover’s Complaint” sometimes executes his exercise in obfuscation. As Vickers persuasively argues, “Shakespeare’s affinities were with Sidney, Daniel and Drayton, whose syntax was much closer to the ‘playne and easye composition’ desired by Thomas Wilson” than the poet responsible for this rhyming narrative.
In fact, the “Complaint” poet’s way with words more closely resembles Grossart’s depiction of Davies, whose vocabulary, “if not marked by culture, is suggestive of considerable and out-o’-the-way reading. . . . Some of his words—since worn and familiar—flash out finely, e.g. translucent, refulgent, purple, diaphanal, accloy, adamantine, attone, coact, empery, and abundant others.” Unfortunately, Davies was equally inclined to make neologisms for novelty’s sake, or to satisfy a rhyme. In one attributed poem, he rhymed the word “gander” with “wander,” then added in the margin, “for the Rime’s necessity.”
Paucity of imagination is not a flaw one would usually lay at Shakespeare’s door. And yet, when, at the end of line 297, the “Complainer” needs a rhyme for “craft,” he made the past tense of “doff” (as in “to doff a cap”) into “daffed,” which is plain daft. Vickers cites “another [such] enforced neologism when recording the woman’s self-defence of having capitulated to her tempter—‘Who young and simple would not be so loverd’—the rhyme scheme he had chosen [having] already given him ‘coverd’ and ‘hoverd.’” It would be one thing to accuse the Midlander of having little Latin or Greek, another to suggest that Shakespeare could ever have stooped so low with the language he used better than anyone before or since.
Rhymes are a constant minefield to the man behind this curious “Complaint.” Rather than displaying the fluidity of a man who had two dozen powerful plays, a couple of accomplished narrative poems, and a complex sonnet-sequence under his belt, this anonymous auteur uses a cliched triple rhyme like wind/find/minde (86-89) (and, as Vickers points out, exactly the same rhyme occurs in Davies’s Humours Heav’n on Earth); while in another stanza, he is “forced to use a rhyme-word twice, ‘takes,’ ‘makes,’ ‘takes’ (107-10).” He also recycles rhymes like the world is running out of words. Find/minde (88-89) turns up again less than fifty lines later, as mind/find (135/137), and within a further fifty lines, again as mind/find (184/187).
As Vickers tellingly observes, the “Complaint” poet “displays a lack of invention of which . . . Shakespeare was never guilty.” And yet, when he published his verified view in the summer of 2007, he found no shortage of dissenters. In the TLS, the role of reviewer devolved to Harold Love, author of The Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in 17th Century England, an ideal recipient. And Love partly embraced Vickers’s thesis, feeling convinced “personally that Shakespeare was not the author of the Complaint,” but he felt there was something missing, something the author could have found in Mackail if he’d looked closely enough: “Internal evidence of the kind that is given pride of place in this study should ideally be supplemented by external evidence; but here there is still much uncertainty. In order to establish his case, Vickers [really] has . . . to revisit the publishing history of the Sonnets.”
A wise old bird, Love had nailed the one hole in Vickers’s thesis. In fact, Vickers had stopped short of the one supposition that could have led him where he needed to go, even when briefly revisiting “the publishing history of the Sonnets” in the six pages he devoted to “Thomas Thorpe and the 1609
Sonnets.” Rather than expending much of his undoubted brain-power on how “A Lover’s Complaint” ended up in Q, Vickers posited four possible scenarios, three of which made Thorpe culpable in some way for misleading his readers:
Given the vast flood of poetry in circulation at any time, honest mistakes could and did occur . . . but several other scenarios are possible. (1) Thorpe did not know the author of the poem, but added Shakespeare’s name. . . . (2) The manuscript that reached Thorpe was written in the same hand as the Sonnets, so Thorpe concluded that the Complaint was also by Shakespeare. (If so, why was it not mentioned either in the Stationers’ Register or on the title page?) (3) Thorpe knew that the Complaint was by John Davies of Hereford, but . . . substituted a more famous name. (4) Thorpe . . . knew Davies and actually commissioned the poem from him in order to round off his volume. Honoured by the invitation, Davies obliged, adopting the stanza form of . . . The Rape of Lucrece, and trying to adopt a Shakespearean idiom.
But there was a fifth possibility that Vickers failed to consider, one which could provide the kind of “external evidence” needed to turn a mere possibility into a strong probability. Perhaps Thorpe was an innocent dupe and it was John Davies of Hereford who deliberately passed the poem off as Shakespeare’s, deceiving the publisher, who took the poem at face value because it came from the very same “source” who had provided him with the sonnets. Indeed, the manuscript that reached Thorpe may well have been written in the same hand as the sonnets that he had (probably already) received precisely because it was Davies who wrote “A Lover’s Complaint,” though only after first copying out his favorite poet’s sonnets, which he’d acquired some time ago.