So Long as Men Can Breathe

Shakespeare, though, was no oral poet—he was reliant on the preservation of the written word for the survival of his poems. And the slender evidence that exists for the life of the sonnets in manuscript suggests that, from their very creation, there were degrees of privacy that Shakespeare applied selectively to this material. As Dover-Wilson suggests, “Thorpe [probably] had at his disposal transcripts of two distinct classes of sonnets: (a) what we may call portfolio sonnets, namely the ‘sugred sonnets’ known to Meres in 1599; and (b) what we may call secret or private sonnets.”

Dover-Wilson himself was convinced that the latter group were “those connected with the Dark Woman.” I think not. It seems to me that the Dark Lady sonnets fall into the former category, his “portfolio sonnets.” Not only do they “bewail and bemoan the perplexities of Love,” like the ones that Meres described, but two of them passed from somebody’s poetical miscellany into the greedy clutches of William Jaggard as early as 1599 (and, as Harold Love notes, “The most characteristic mode through which verse was circulated to [Jacobethan] readers was the miscellany containing work by a number of writers”—the era’s equivalent of the iPod).

The “secret or private sonnets” surely were the Fair Youth sonnets (Q18-126), from which just a single sniff of a copy transcribed from manuscript has survived, and then, only if we consider that the one seventeenth-century manuscript text of Q106, preserved in a couple of corrupt texts—the Holgate Commonplace Book, circa 1650, and the Rosenbach manuscript—does not derive from Q, but traveled independently (if so, it acquired at least two clear corruptions, “mine” for “rime” and “pleasant” for “present”). The title the sonnet was given in both manuscripts, “On His Mistress’ Beauty,” certainly suggests that its transmission was some way removed from any autograph copy, and that the person responsible had never seen other sonnets in the same sequence, or even read this sonnet with any diligence.

The four (other) sonnets that we can, with a degree of confidence, surmise were in circulation as manuscripts in the 1590s or early 1600s (Q2, 8, 138, 144) do not contain even a whiff of impropriety with a male member of the nobility. This might explain why they met with such miscellaneous approbation, in a way that, say, Sonnet 20 or 26 would not have. But it seems more likely that the former sonnets were disseminated, in manuscript and print, precisely because they were among the “less private” of the sonnets that Shakespeare felt inspired to write at this time—to satirize a fad, to immortalize a friend, to demonstrate a deep affection, to exercise his poetic skills, and/or simply to pass the time (which, we know, was ever on his mind).

We know that Shakespeare did circulate certain sonnets “among his private friends,” while keeping the order and contents of a more ambitious sequence to himself. It otherwise beggars coincidence that none of the four “pre-Q” sonnets should come from the central sequence, even though it accounts for over two-thirds of Q’s contents. Unfortunately, accepting this, we remove the one solid historical ballast that might anchor the Fair Youth sonnets to a specific date or period in the poet’s life.

As for the others, I tend to think they circulated in two sets, one by Shakespeare—as Meres suggests—the other probably not. The ones that passed “quickly” into print came from the first set, the so-called Dark Lady sonnets, though this really is a misnomer. They are a miscellany, as they were intended to be—Shakespeare showing off for friends and other strangers. I personally doubt that they ever included the two Cupid sonnets (Q153-54), but elsewhere they handsomely display Shakespeare’s singular wit, even when in the pit of amorous despair.

Though the ones in the other set, 1-17, appear to have a direct relationship with the Fair Youth sonnets, they smack of a commission from a wealthy patron seeking to use the power of poetic persuasion for an immediate purpose—to convince a young lord to marry. If this was indeed the case, the sonnets became the property of the patron, to do with as s/he willed. As Shakespeare suggests in his seemingly extravagant 1594 Lucrece dedication to the Earl of Southampton, “What I have done is yours.”

The youth himself, delighted by these sonnets, if not persuaded by them, may well have shown them to acquaintances. But the fact that Q2 and probably Q8 had an alternate path to posterity does rather suggest that they received a discreet circulation of their own, along avenues separate from those by which Jaggard acquired his booty (given similar concerns expressed in Passionate Pilgrim, we can be confident that Jaggard would have utilized any “marriage” sonnets that had come his way).

The central series of sonnets, though, bears all the marks of a “real” sonnet-sequence, and a private one at that. Replete with all the thematic connections, rhyme-links, sense-links, and forward motion of a narrative, it has that fragile unity one would expect from a sequence “written over three or more years, as an autobiographical one, following the ups and downs of an emotional relationship” [EKC]. The other parts of Q, i.e., the prefatory “marriage” sonnets and the “disordered appendix,” do not. The marriage sonnets have thematic integrity, but as a group they are entirely static, whereas the “disordered appendix” lacks a consistent seriousness of tone. The Fair Youth sonnets, in contrast, are bejewelled by both that seriousness and that structure—which Shakespeare signposted by his selection of 108 poems.

Ironically, Katherine Duncan-Jones is the first modern academic to identify these 108 sonnets as a sequence unto themselves, and to suggest they reflect “many elements of thematic and structural coherence . . . which commentators have failed to recognize.” (Ironic because she also finds such elements where they are largely absent, i.e. in sonnets 1- 17 and 127-54.) Despite sharing this common ground with Duncan-Jones, I reach a quite different conclusion. Believing that Shakespeare did indeed construct this sequence after 1598—and that Q generally adhered to its authorial “integrity” because the structure of the central sequence lent itself to being kept that way—I find no such “structural coherence” in the organization, editing, or presentation of the other sonnets in Q.

Yet it took Duncan-Jones to demonstrate that Shakespeare’s Fair Youth sequence “conforms to the precedent set by Sidney in Astrophil & Stella, which in the authoritative 1598 text, overseen by his sister, has 108 sonnets [plus an envoi].” “In totalling 108/9,” Duncan-Jones writes, Shakespeare “must surely have intended to label his sequence as belonging in some sense to the august tradition established by Sidney.” Nor, to an Elizabethan, would the numerical significance of 108 have been simply confined to this poetic precedent. Equally importantly, 108 was a number divisible into units of two, three, four, six, nine, and twelve.

Northrop Frye may well be right to posit that the sequence “revolves around the youth in a series of three cycles, each of which apparently lasts for a year and takes him through every aspect of his love.” But Shakespeare’s sequence seems subtler still. With each year comprising four seasons, the sequence that Frye divides into units of thirty-six further devolves down to units of nine—and then three. Chambers, positing his own theory about the sonnets’ organization in 1943, was one who saw triplets at every turn:

Many contiguous sonnets were clearly written, if not at one time, at any rate under a common impulse, and fall naturally into pairs or triplets or even larger groups. . . . Sometimes there is a definite grammatical connection . . . through which argument flows on. Sometimes it is merely a matter of a continuous theme, as in . . . the nine which complain that he has found another poet. Often . . . the sense-linking of a group is emphasized by a definite stylistic device . . . the constant repetition of significant words and also . . . of rhyme-sounds, in sonnets so related.

And such sophistication would not be lost on an Elizabethan, particularly a well-read one, to whom such sets of sonnets “were far from being collections of miscellaneous poems. [His] readers would be accustomed to sonnet series in some such form, and would expect to find groups where each new sonnet said the same thing a little differently, or else carried forward the theme of the previous one” [KW]. Thankfully, such a sophisticated sequence retained its Shakespearean self because the procurer, not the publisher, took real care with the material.

Which brings us back, somewhat circuitously, to the activities of our friend from Hereford, the redoubtable Mr. Davies. The fact that Davies frequented the houses of nobles is a matter of record, and we know that he was an acquirer of literary manuscripts. Opportunities to transcribe any poems addressed to a pupil of his would certainly have arisen. That Davies would have been up to the task, and would have seized such opportunities, fits with what we know about his personality. When it came to the marriage sonnets, one would have thought all he had to do was ask. But what about a longer, more private sonnet-sequence?

Described by Thomas Fuller, in England’s Worthies (1662), as “the greatest master of the pen that England in her age beheld,” Davies was equally renowned “for Fast-writing, so incredible [was] his expedition.” Whenever it was that such an opportunity arose, we can assume his interest in such displays of Shakespeare’s “wit” had already been piqued, aligned to his documented interest in literary manuscripts. (At one point he refers to having seen Greville’s Mustapha in manuscript, “as it is written, not printed,” while, according to Vickers, he imitated Donne’s “The Flea”—which he can only have seen as a manuscript—long before it was published.)

It is even possible that Davies was asked to transcribe Shakespeare’s sonnets by one of his patrons, and took a copy for himself. At this time, any secretary (and therefore, presumably, any writing-master), “if his master was a writer, or a collector of others’ writings, he would expect to do regular turns at transcription in addition to his other duties, and to serve as a point of relay for documents circulating through author and user publication” [HL]. The Pembrokes fit such a remit. So do others in Davies’ circle. And we have at least one extant example of a set of poems transcribed by a secretary for his employer, the manuscript of John Donne’s poems that Rowland Woodward copied for his employer Francis Fane, first Earl of Westmorland.

However, if Davies, or the unknown scribe who chanced upon Q18- 126, was working from an autograph copy, it would appear that the script itself was problematic. In particular, the idiosyncratic use of italics in Q suggests a confusion at source, probably as a result of the autograph copy being in what would be called the “Secretary” hand. As Love outlines, in his invaluable history of seventeenth-century scribal publications:

Secretary was a derivative of the 15th century “gothic” hand of the same name. Those who used it as their regular hand would often use italic for proper names and headings or interpolated passages that required to be distinguished in some way. . . . Both the problems and advantages [of the script] are on display in the section of BL Harleian MS 7368 . . . [which] use two or more forms for single letters . . . [like] a, b, g, h, p, s and t, [and] the impression may have been even stronger if the writer had not been so sparing in his use of capitals.

The section of Manuscript 7368 under discussion is the part of Sir Thomas More believed to be in the handwriting of a certain William Shakespeare. Davies, as a professional writing-master, would have been able to write in at least two hands, the native secretary and the imported italic. We can be fairly certain that he would have faithfully transcribed an autograph manuscript, but one doubts that such respect would have been given by the compositor of Q. As Joseph Moxon clearly states in his Caroline textbook, Mechanik Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing (1683), it is “a task and duty incumbent on the Compositor . . . to discern and amend the bad Spelling and Pointing of his Copy.” In fact, we can probably assume that two compositors worked on the central sonnet-sequence, which was divided equally between them. Hence, the fourteen instances in sonnets 18-71 where the one compositor has mistaken “their” for “thy,” but just a single instance in the second half of the sequence.

Though it is perfectly possible that Davies, or the anonymous procurer, received a third party’s scribal copy (or copies) when he acquired the less private sonnets (Q1-17, 127-52), it seems unlikely that he would have had the permanent loan of the prized Fair Youth sonnets, even if his acquisition of them was not in some way underhanded. (Needless to say, I do not subscribe to the view of some scholars that the Fair Youth sequence must have been acquired from “one of three persons”—Shakespeare, the Fair Youth, or the Dark Lady.)

As Harold Love has shown, a number of “the better-known poets, Alexander Brome, Sir John Davies, Donne, Harington, the two Herberts, King, Marvell and Katherine Philips, all seem to have taken a supervisory role in the production and circulation of copies of their works.” Shakespeare surely supervised the distribution of such a sensitive sequence closely, hoping to keep it, for at least a time, “within a closed circle of readers, on the understanding it is not to be allowed to go beyond the circle.” In this, he probably relied “upon their primary audience’s knowledge of the particular circumstances that generated [the sonnets]” [AM]. But he did not count on the collector mentality, because he was not one himself. Or he would never have left such a nonexistent paper trail behind him.

Over the years, much has been made of the scholar-poets and their supposed “spat” with Shakespeare the populist. What is intriguing about any such dynamic is how it has been built upon the suspicion that Shakespeare was always at least a single step removed from many of his contemporaries—unlike, say, Jonson, who seems to have enjoyed the full gamut of rivalries, animosities, and friendships with his peers. No Shakespearean presentation copies, foul papers, autograph manuscripts, or even personal dedications to fellow playwrights and poets have survived the centuries. Shakespeare, I suspect, didn’t care about such things.

Yet for many of his contemporaries and near-contemporaries, the world of scribal manuscripts was a refreshing medium of propagation and dissemination, free of censorship, and grasping printers. Sadly, we know almost nothing of the way that William’s work circulated privately, but H. R. Woudhuysen’s attempt “to build up a picture of a group of men and women interested in Sidney’s work, eager to obtain copies of his poems,” can probably be applied equally to his successor. And though, by his own admission, Woudhuysen “may not be able to [exactly] define this scribal community . . . the links which can be forged among the earlier owners of Sidney’s works in manuscript”—and, I dare say, Shakespeare’s—“are often powerful ones.”

If I am right, then the minor poet John Davies of Hereford and the major playwright Richard Brome were both associate members of the equivalent collecting-circle. As presumably was Francis Meres; and, we can probably safely assume, Ben Jonson. Unfortunately, this circle rarely seems to have crossed with the far more active circle that seems to have built up around the poetry of John Donne, whose work circulated extremely widely in the period immediately after Shakespeare’s death. And some things that passed between members of the bardic circle—the fabled play of Cardenio, for one—are long gone.

Such a tantalizing tragedy raises issues that resound even to this day. The issue of artistic control has now become the preserve of lawyers and managers; but the collecting mentality, and its close cousin, the impulse to bootleg, has endured. I still wonder what would happen if there was, out in the world today, an intrinsically private work like Shakespeare’s sonnets, as resonant, as “desirable,” as essential to an understanding of a truly great wordsmith, just waiting to be discovered.

As it happens, there is, and I have followed its trail closely. The Blood on the Tracks notebook, the “little red notebook,” contains some seventeen lyrics in the handwriting of Bob Dylan—dare I suggest, the Shakespeare of his day?—written in the summer of 1974. Ten of these he subsequently recorded for the album of the same name, seven of them he didn’t. Here are the lyrics, public and private, that record the passionate affair that threatened a previously strong marriage, along with a Wild West fantasy, a valedictory to an earlier affair, and a night he spent with a prostitute in 1962 (really!).

What the artist elected to use of this material appeared the following January, and sold in the millions—just think, a work of this rich artistic quality actually becoming a number one album on both sides of the Atlantic. It is still selling tens of thousands of copies a year, in digital formats that weren’t even invented when the record was made; for it, too, is destined to endure “so long as men can breathe.” But the album is not the notebook, which is so much more personal an artifact—if you like, Dylan’s “sugred sonnets.”¹⁹

Such a notebook, to a fan, would be priceless. To a collector, it would be extremely valuable. Its author knew that, and he held on to it. However, a couple of decades later, it went missing, then turned up in the house of a Brooklyn merchant-banker, becoming the crown jewel of the largest collection of Dylan manuscripts in the world. (Twenty years after it was used to record the album, I was privileged to inspect the notebook at the home of its then-owner.) But then Dylan himself heard of its reemergence, and—being powerful enough to reclaim what was once his—set the wheels in motion to remove the notebook from prying eyes. Eventually, it was agreed that the notebook would be donated to the Morgan Library, in New York, and that access would be restricted only to those who had the blessing of Dylan’s office.

In the meantime, not surprisingly, the notebook had become a “holy grail” to Dylan collectors. Rumors of at least one copy made during its fleeting passage from Dylan to procurer to collector continued to abound (prompting an editorial in the New York Observer by Ron Rosenbaum, in the Francis Meres role, who later wrote his own book on the original bard, The Shakespeare Wars). And, sure enough, such a copy was made, along with a “scan” of the notebook made on behalf of the Brooklyn collector, prior to its return to its rightful owner—and author.

And yet still the contents of the notebook have stayed outside the public domain, accessible only to a handful of fortunate souls. Rest assured, though, that should the original go up in flames tonight, if lightning should strike the Morgan Library out of shape, the collecting mentality has already ensured its contents will be preserved for the ages. Because sometimes a work of art is just too damn important to be entrusted to the artist. Sometimes it takes a brigand with a piratical disposition to say, “Screw the consequences, let’s put this out.”

So perhaps we should remind ourselves that, for all his dubious business practices, Thomas Thorpe did the world a huge favor when he obtained, bound, and published the secret sonnets of Shakespeare. These supreme sonnets that remind us of the fleeting nature of true passion, and the impermanence of even the written word. Not one scrap remains from the handful of copies of these sonnets that were passed around in manuscript. Not even a copy of a copy, assuming, as I do, that such a thing once existed. John Davies of Hereford’s papers are long gone, as are Richard Brome’s. Only the booklegger, with his disregard for the niceties of authorial rights, and disdain for any poetic sensibilities he might upset, saved the sonnets, and alone ensured that they shall live on “so long as men can breathe.”