William shakespeare shakespeares sonnets, arden shakespeare

76 7 Drawing by Max Beerbohm of 'William Shakespeare writing a sonnet' 1907 courtesy of Mrs Reichmann 81 8 Jane Lapotaire in the Channel 4 series of readings from Sonnets, 1983 court

T H E A R D E N S H A K E S P E A R E

T H I R D S E R I E S

General Editors: Richard Proudfoot, A n n T h o m p s o n

and David Scott Kastan

S H A K E S P E A R E ' S

S O N N E T S

For my m o t h e r and my daughters

T h e general editors o f the A r d e n Shakespeare have b e e n

W J Craig and R H Case (first series 1 8 9 9 - 1 9 4 4 )

U n a E l l i s - F e r m o r , H a r o l d F Brooks, H a r o l d Jenkins and Brian M o r r i s ( s e c o n d series 1 9 4 6 - 8 2 )

Present general editors (third series)

Richard P r o u d f o o t , A n n T h o m p s o n and D a v i d S c o t t Kastan

T h i s e d i t i o n o f Shakespeare's Sonnets, by Katherine D u n c a n - J o n e s

first p u b l i s h e d 1997 by T h o m a s N e l s o n and S o n s L t d

Editorial material © 1997 K a t h e r i n e D u n c a n - J o n e s

T y p e s e t in Ehrhardt by M u l t i p l e x T e c h n i q u e s L t d

Printed in Italy

All rights reserved N o part o f this book m a y be reprinted or

r e p r o d u c e d or utilized in any form or by any electronic,

m e c h a n i c a l , or other m e a n s , n o w k n o w n or hereafter

i n v e n t e d , i n c l u d i n g p h o t o c o p y i n g and recording, or in any

i n f o r m a t i o n storage or retrieval s y s t e m , without p e r m i s s i o n in

WTiting from the publishers

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

C O N T E N T S

List of illustrations vii

General editors' preface ix

Preface xii Introduction 1

Date 1 Publishing history 29

Context and allusion 45

Reception and criticism 69

Abbreviations and references

Abbreviations used in the notes 467

Works by and partly by Shakespeare 467

Editions of Shakespeare collated 469

Other works cited 469

Index 477 First line index 485

v

Katherine D u n c a n - J o n e s has published well over forty articles on Elizabethan and Jacobean literature Her

biography Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet appeared in

1991 S h e is a Tutorial Fellow in English at Somerville College, Oxford, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature

VI

I L L U S T R A T I O N S

1 Michael Drayton's coat of arms beside Shakespeare's 24

From BL MS Harley 6140, fol 46v

2 Triumphal arch with pyramids, 'The new Arabia felix',

erected above the Cheapside conduit, March 1603/4

From Stephen Harrison, The Arch's of Triumph (1604), sig F

(Bodleian Gough London 145) 25

3 Simon van de Passe, engraved portrait of William Herbert,

Third Earl of Pembroke (1580-1630) From Henry Holland,

Bazilwlogia: A Booke of Kings (1618), fol 89r (Bodleian 4°

6 Drawings by George Steevens and Edmond Malone inscribed

on the verso of the first flyleaf of SHAKE-SPEARES

SONNETS (1609) 76

7 Drawing by Max Beerbohm of 'William Shakespeare writing

a sonnet' (1907) (courtesy of Mrs Reichmann) 81

8 Jane Lapotaire in the Channel 4 series of readings from

Sonnets, 1983 (courtesy of Goldcrest Films) 84

9 Ben Kingsley in the Channel 4 series of readings from

Sonnets, 1983 (courtesy of Goldcrest Films) 87

10 Opening of A Lover's Complaint in the 1609 Quarto

vu

13 Title-page of the 1609 Quarto (Bodleian Malone 34) 107

14a Early transcription of sonnet 128 From Bodleian MS Rawl

poet 152, fol 34r 458

14b Transcription on same ms of William Browne, 'Love's

Labyrinth', and Sonnet II in Francis Davison's A Poetical

Rhapsody From Bodleian MS Rawl poet 152, fol 34v 459

G E N E R A L E D I T O R S '

PREFACE

T h e Arden Shakespeare is now nearly one h u n d r e d years old T h e

earliest volume in the first series, Edward D o w d e n ' s Hamlet, was

published in 1899 Since then the Arden Shakespeare has become internationally recognized and respected It is now widely acknowledged as the pre-eminent Shakespeare series, valued by scholars, students, actors, and 'the great variety of readers' alike for its readable and reliable texts, its full annotation and its richly informative introductions

We have aimed in the third A r d e n edition to maintain t h e quality and general character of its predecessors, preserving t h e

c o m m i t m e n t to presenting t h e work as it has been shaped in history W h i l e each individual volume will necessarily have its own emphasis in the light of t h e u n i q u e possibilities and problems posed by t h e work, the edition as a whole, like t h e earlier Ardens, insists u p o n the highest standards of scholarship and upon attractive and accessible presentation

Newly edited from the original quarto and folio editions, the texts are presented in fully m o d e r n i z e d form, with a textual apparatus that records all substantial divergences from those early printings T h e notes and introductions focus on the conditions and possibilities of m e a n i n g t h a t e d i t o r s a n d critics have d i s ­ covered in the work While building u p o n the rich history of scholarly activity that has long shaped our u n d e r s t a n d i n g of Shakespeare's texts, this third series of the Arden Shakespeare is made necessary and possible by a new generation's encounter with Shakespeare, engaging with the works and their complex relation

to the culture in which they were - and continue to be - produced

General Editors ' Preface

T H E T E X T

O n each page of t h e work itself, readers will find a passage of text

s u p p o r t e d by c o m m e n t a r y and textual notes In the text itself, unfamiliar typographic conventions have been avoided in order to minimize obstacles to t h e reader Elided forms in the early texts are spelt o u t in full wherever they indicate a usual late-twentieth- century pronunciation that requires n o special indication Marks

of elision are retained where they are necessary guides to the scansion and pronunciation of the line Final -ed in past tense and participial forms of verbs is always printed as -ed, without accent, never as - ' d , b u t wherever t h e required pronunciation diverges from m o d e r n usage a note in the commentary draws attention to the fact W h e r e the final -ed should be given syllabic value contrary to m o d e r n usage, e.g

L e s t m y bewailed guilt should do thee shame,

(Son 36.10)

t h e note will take t h e form

10 bewailed bewailed

C O M M E N T A R Y A N D T E X T U A L N O T E S

N o t e s in t h e commentary, for which a major source will be the

Oxford English Dictionary, offer glossarial and other explication of

verbal difficulties; they may also include discussion of points

of interpretation and, in relevant cases, substantial extracts from Shakespeare's source material Editors will not usually offer

glossarial notes for words adequately defined in the Concise Oxford

Dictionary or Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, b u t in

cases of d o u b t they will include notes Attention, however, will be drawn to places where m o r e than one likely interpretation can be proposed and to significant verbal and syntactic complexity N o t e s preceded by * involve discussion of textual variants or readings

e m e n d e d from t h e early edition(s) on which the text is based

x

General Editors' Preface

T h e textual notes are designed to let readers know w h e n t h e edited text diverges from t h e early edition(s) on w h i c h it is based W h e r e v e r this h a p p e n s t h e note will record t h e rejected reading of the early edition(s), in original spelling, and t h e source of the reading adopted in this edition O t h e r forms from the early edition(s) recorded in these notes will include some spellings of particular interest or significance T h e textual notes take a form that has been in use since t h e n i n e t e e n t h century

T h i s comprises, first: line reference, reading adopted in t h e text and closing square bracket; then: abbreviated reference, in italic, to the earliest edition to a d o p t t h e accepted reading, italic semicolon and noteworthy alternative reading(s), each with abbreviated italic reference to its source Distinctive spellings of the basic text follow the square bracket w i t h o u t indication

of source N a m e s enclosed in brackets indicate originators of conjectural e m e n d a t i o n s w h e n these did not originate in an edition of the text, or w h e n this edition records a conjecture n o t accepted into its text

xi

P R E F A C E

Pope's exclamation at the beginning of The Rape of the Lock, ' W h a t

mighty contests rise from trivial things', applies supremely to

Shakespeare s Sonnets Any and every detail of these poems may be

the occasion of angry dispute, and many have been so, though I have tried not to get too m u c h involved in such controversies With reference to the text of individual sonnets, the minutest features of spelling, punctuation and format have m o m e n t o u s consequences for resonance and meaning I have never felt more strongly than when working on this text the force of Oscar Wilde's account of a writer's hard labours: spending the whole m o r n i n g putting in a comma, and the whole afternoon taking it out In the belief not only that such matters are immensely important, but also that the

1609 Q u a r t o printing reflects the minutiae, as well as the substance,

of a copy manuscript certainly authorized, and perhaps also

p e n n e d , by Shakespeare himself, I have attempted to represent the details of this text as faithfully as the requirements of moderniz­

ation will allow T h i s is, for instance, the first edited text of Sonnets

to include the two pairs of empty parentheses which follow the couplet poem n u m b e r e d 126 While previous editors have suggested that these were inserted by the printers, who noticed that the p o e m was composed only of twelve lines, not fourteen, I think this an unlikely intervention We know that George Eld's compositors were accustomed to working for such meticulously niggling writers as Ben Jonson, and a detailed analysis of their 1607-8 publications by Peter M u r r a y suggests that they habitually reproduced the characteristic spelling forms they encountered, rather than imposing 'house style'.1

six-1 M u r r a y , passim

Preface

Contextually, also, matters which may not seem immediately of vital interest or importance here are so P a r a m o u n t is the question

of date T h e weight of tradition has favoured an early date, placing

Sonnets close in time to the two narrative poems, in 1 5 9 3 ^ - , and

bracketing all three non-dramatic works together as probably connected with the patronage of the young H e n r y Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton Biographically, for many Victorian and

Edwardian critics, this dating made it possible to sideline Sonnets as

an uncharacteristic, and perhaps in some respects compromising or even disgraceful, product of Shakespeare's youth T h e writing of them could be seen as a brilliant but embarrassing folly which he left behind him as his career as a dramatist developed, rather as he had left behind him his (supposed) early exploits as a poacher of Sir T h o m a s Lucy's deer In the present edition it is proposed that,

on the contrary, though we may never discover how early some individual sonnets or versions of sonnets were composed, there is good reason to believe that the whole sequence as published in

1609 was p u t into its final shape after 1603, and possibly quite close

to its printing It is for this reason that so m u c h space is given, in the Introduction, to the issue of dating, for the evidence and arguments presented here represent a radical departure from previous study And as for the compromising or 'disgraceful' elements of the sonnets: their homoeroticism is here confronted positively, and is newly contextualized within the powerfully 'homosociaP world of James Fs court T h e case for their association with S o u t h a m p t o n largely collapses, but the case for their connection with William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, becomes newly plausible T h e 'Pembrokian' hypothesis is r e ­ examined, with the citation of some new supportive evidence As a whole, the sequence can be seen, not as a youthful folly, but as the mature and considered work of a successful professional writer Some of what is done here was anticipated in J o h n Kerrigan's

excellent Penguin edition (1986) For instance, he too included A

Lover's Complaint, and argued for its place as a structural

component of the published sequence However, there appears still

Preface

to be strong resistance to this poem, which is rarely included in

discussion of Sonnets, or, indeed, of any of Shakespeare's work

T h e decision of the N e w Cambridge editors to place A Lover's

Complaint with the narrative poems, and to exclude it altogether

from Blakemore Evans's 1996 edition of Sonnets, suggests that the

case for its authenticity and integrity needs to be reaffirmed It is for this reason that its formal and thematic place in the sequence is discussed in some detail in the penultimate section of the Introduction A matter which Kerrigan did not address is the form

of the sequence's title, Shakespeare9s Sonnets T h o u g h some other

editors, most notably Stephen Booth, have used this form of title, its authority and meaning have never before been fully examined

Because so m u c h of the contextualization of Shakespeare's

Sonnets here is essentially new, priority has been given to matters

of date and context, rather than to a full chronicle of the work's critical history B u t if the present text c o m m a n d s acceptance, there will be m u c h fresh work for critics to do in the next millennium, as they come to t e r m s with the exciting complexities

of this extraordinary work of the Jacobean Shakespeare

In preparing this edition, my first debt is to previous editors of

Shakespeare's Sonnets, and above all to the great E d m o n d Malone,

whose 1780 edition was the first to take this text seriously and to

u n d o the h a r m done to it by the publisher John Benson in 1640

H E Rollins's wonderfully encyclopaedic two-volume variorum has been my daily resource for more than three years I have also derived

m u c h illumination from Ingram and Redpath and from Stephen Booth J o h n Kerrigan's 1986 Penguin edition is so close in time, and

so excellent in its subtlety and scholarship, that I have avoided consulting it as often as I would have liked, for fear of relying on it excessively Several people have helped me by perusing sugared sections of the notes or the Introduction or both First and foremost among these private friends is my mother, M r s E.E Duncan-Jones; others include D r H e n r y Woudhuysen, Professor Steve May and D r Julia Griffin Constant and generous communications on the vexed matter of dating from Professor Kent Hieatt have ensured that I

xiv

Preface

could never succumb to the temptation to shelve it I have also derived enormous help and inspiration from glimpses of Professor Helen Vendler's work in progress, and from a conversation with her

in Los Angeles, during which among other things she showed me how to deal with those 'rebel powers' in sonnet 146 Kevin Billington

lent me videos of the readings from Shakespeare's Sonnets made for

Channel Four under his direction in 1983: if the 'performance history' of these non-dramatic texts ever comes to be written, these deserve pride of place Others who have given me specialist help include John Carey, Jeremy Catto, Martin Dodsworth, Barbara Harvey, Ernst Honigmann, John Kerrigan, D o n McKenzie, Paul Morgan, Jan Piggott, Judith Priestman, Christopher Ricks, Geraldo

de Sousa, Fiona Stafford, Brian Vickers, George Walton Williams, Michael Webb, Bee Wilson and Emily Wilson Gryszina Cooper, at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, has twice come to my rescue at moments of electronic collapse compounded by human fallibility Libraries and archives where I have worked happily include, in addition to my regular haunt, the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the British Library, the Public Record Office, the Stratford Records Office, the Shakespeare Institute, Westminster Abbey, the Henry E Huntington Library, Trinity College, Cambridge, Dulwich College Library and Balliol College, Oxford At the stage

of near-completion this text benefited enormously from the keen eyes and diverse perceptions of Richard Proudfoot and Ann Thompson, and at a later stage still from the meticulous scrutiny of the copy-editor, Roger Fallon M y own stubbornness should be blamed for those errors and deficiencies that survive their labours I owe my college, Somerville, grateful thanks for support and friendship, and in particular for a term of sabbatical leave in the spring of 1996 Many Somerville students over the years have opened my eyes to readings I hadn't thought of - so many that it would be invidious even to attempt to record all their names

Katherine Duncan-Jones

Oxford

had been entered in the Stationers' Register on 7th September):

As the soule of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras:

so the sweete wittie soule of Ouid Hues in mellifluous &

hony-tongued Shakespeare', witnes his Venus and Adonis, his

Lucrèce, his sugred Sonnets among his private friends, &C.1

For enthusiastic book-buyers, it might appear that in the ing year, 1599, it had become possible to join t h e fortunate ranks

follow-of Shakespeare's 'private friends', for William Jaggard published

a small octavo volume called THE PASSIONATE PILGRIME

By W Shakespeare, to which were appended six further lyrics

introduced by a separate title-page, SONNETS To sundry notes of

Musicke Only the three sonnets which open The Passionate Pilgrim, and one further sonnet and lyric, can be confidently

claimed as Shakespeare's T h e two opening poems were later to appear in the 1609 Q u a r t o (Q) as sonnets 138 and 144, and the

other three were taken from the 1598 Q u a r t o of Love's Labour's

Lost However, most early readers m u s t quite naturally have

assumed that all twenty poems in The Passionate Pilgrim (PP) were

Shakespeare's, and that they corresponded with the sonnets to which M e r e s referred Evidently the little volume sold well, for

1 Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia Wits Treasury Being the Second Part of Wits

Commonwealth (1598), fols 281v -2 r

1

Introduction

two editions seem to have been published in close succession, the first surviving only as a fragment.1 B u t for discerning readers of contemporary poetry, many of w h o m , like Francis M e r e s and

J o h n Weever,2 m u s t have also been admirers of Shakespeare's

plays, The Passionate Pilgrim was surely disappointing, in both

quality and quantity S u c h readers may naturally have concluded that M e r e s had over-praised Shakespeare's 'sugred Sonnets', which were not, after all, such delicate sweetmeats Slight, quirky, occasionally sententious and frequently obscene, Jaggard's miscel­

lany did the fast-rising playwright no great credit Indeed, PP 2

and 9 (one an authentic Shakespeare poem, the other probably not), with their unattractive allusions to the female genitalia either

as 'hell' or as a ' w o u n d ' , might have caused readers alert to such nuance to wonder whether Meres's '&c.' concealed another such allusion,3 and characterized Shakespeare - who was, according to

M e r e s , a reanimated Ovid - as a writer who specialized in making ingeniously unpleasant allusions to that part of the body

According to the later testimony of T h o m a s Heywood, Shakespeare had been ' m u c h offended' with William Jaggard, ' t h a t altogether u n k n o w n e to h i m p r e s u m e d to make so bold with his n a m e '4 In 1612 J a g g a r d had c o m p o u n d e d his offence

by b r i n g i n g o u t a third edition of The Passionate Pilgrim, which

was now p l u m p e d out with the addition of two epistles and other

material from T h o m a s H e y wood's Troia Britannica (1608) It was this which provoked H e y w o o d ' s public r e m o n s t r a n c e in An

Apology for Actors H e y w o o d was evidently afraid that

Shakespeare m i g h t blame h i m for this latest piracy and

misattri-b u t i o n , since J a g g a r d had misattri-been his pumisattri-blisher for the authorized

Troia Britannica, and was s t u n g into making a public attack on

J a g g a r d by t h e need to clear his own name It should not be assumed, simply because t h e r e is little documentary evidence

1 Cf TxQ 455

2 John Weever, Epigrammes (1599) sig E6r

3 Cf Rf (First Quarto) 2.1.37-8, 'O that she were / An open Et Cetera'; 2H4 2.4.181, 'And are etceteras nothings?'; Partridge, Bawdy, 109

4 Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors, (1612), sig G4

2

Introduction

close in time to their publication, t h a t Shakespeare did n o t care

about the two 1599 publications of The Passionate Pilgrim

Heywood, one of the earliest a d m i r e r s a n d closest imitators of

Shakespeare's first published p o e m , Venus and Adonis/ was m o s t

likely well placed to know for certain b o t h t h a t Shakespeare had been angry with Jaggard in 1599, and that he was even m o r e so when he repeated the offence in 1612 J a g g a r d ' s 1612 piracy was all the m o r e brazen in its audacity because, as H e y w o o d said, ' h e [Shakespeare] since, to do himself right, h a t h published t h e m in his own n a m e ' T h a t is, in 1609 Shakespeare had a s s u m e d c o n ­

trol of his own text of his Sonnets, by selling t h e collection to

T h o r p e and giving it t h e title Shakespeare's Sonnets J u d g i n g by the extreme scarcity of surviving copies of The Passionate

Pilgrim, Jaggard's little v e n t u r e had d o n e vexingly well, a n d it

may have seemed for the time being to have spoiled t h e m a r k e t for authentic 'sugred S o n n e t s ' by Shakespeare I n d e e d , it p r o b ­ ably contributed i m p o r t a n t l y to t h e eleven-year gap between Meres's succulent reference in 1598 and t h e eventual publication

of Q j n 1609 - although, as I shall argue in m o r e detail, t h e 1609 sonnets may c o r r e s p o n d only partially with those ' s u g r e d ' ones referred to by M e r e s

O n e piece of evidence has been oddly neglected It may be that Shakespeare in fact took i m m e d i a t e measures to p u t right the w r o n g d o n e to h i m by J a g g a r d in 1599, if we s u p p o s e t h a t he

is the 'W.S.' in t h e following S t a t i o n e r s ' Register e n t r y for

m e n t s possibly referring to Shakespeare Yet it does seem perfectly believable both that Shakespeare may have prepared a collection of his sonnets late in 1599, provoked by Jaggard's p i ­

ratical and mediocre Passionate Pilgrim, and that at one time he

planned to publish it His collaborator in the enterprise could have been J o h n Davies (later ' S i r ' ) , J o h n Davies of Hereford, J o h n Dickenson, J o h n D o n n e (most excitingly) - or some other J D If

he was acting in conjunction with Sir J o h n Davies, the volume

m i g h t have been connected in some way with the somewhat m y s ­

terious ?1599 publication EPI GRAMMES and ELEGIES By

LD and CM., which consisted of the dead Marlowe's translation

of Ovid's Elegies accompanied by Sir J o h n Davies's Epigrams A

connection with Davies is suggested by the H u n t i n g t o n Library

copy of The Passionate Pilgrim, which is b o u n d up, in an appar­

ently contemporary vellum binding, both with the 1599 octavo

Venus and Adonis and with Davies's Epigrammes T h e Epigrammes

excited official disapproval, being included a m o n g other scur­ rilous and libellous works ordered to be b u r n e d , by order of the Bishop of L o n d o n , in J u n e 1599.2 If the ' J D ' of 'Amours'was Sir

J o h n Davies, he could well have decided not to jeopardize his r e p ­ utation with further print publication of his own epigrams, but to limit his poems, such as the 'cobwebb of my invention' which he seems to have composed for Robert Cecil in January 1599/1600,3

to manuscript circulation within a coterie In that case, the title

'Amours' would refer most readily to Ovid's Amores, suggesting a

renewed a t t e m p t by Davies to get Marlowe's translations into

1 Rollins, 2.55

2 Millar MacLure in Marlowe, Poems, xxxi-xxxii; Robert Krueger in Davies, 379

3 Krueger in Davies, xxxviii; BL M S Lansdowne 88, fol 4 r

4

Introduction

print, this time with a perhaps less controversial accompaniment Given the n u m b e r of publications of popular works that have d i s ­ appeared altogether in this period, there is even a remote

possibility that J.D.'s 'Amours' along with W.S.'s 'sonnetes ' actually

did reach print, b u t has left no surviving exemplars If this were the case, and the author of the sonnets Shakespeare, the title-page

description of Shakespeare's Sonnets in Q as ' N e u e r before

I m p r i n t e d ' might serve to assert the independence of (most of?)

this sequence from the J D / W S collection, as well as from The

Passionate Pilgrim Eleazar Edgar, who entered the double work in

the Register, emerged in the early Jacobean period as an u p ­ market bookseller and publisher, whose earliest recorded publica­

tions were editions of the newly acceded m o n a r c h ' s Daemonologie and The True Lawe of Free Monarchies (STCy 14365, 14410) Other publications by E d g a r indicate connections with the t h e ­

atre T h e y include Dekker's The Double PP (1605); M a r s t o n ' s

Sophonisba: The Wonder of Women (1606); Francis B e a u m o n t ' s The Woman Hater (1607); M i d d l e t o n ' s A Mad World My Masters

(1608); and Cyril T o u r n e u r ' s A Funeral! Poem Upon Sir

Francis Vere (1609) T h e 1600 Stationers' Register entry offers at

least a possibility that Shakespeare prepared some sonnets for publication early in 1600, motivated by a desire to p u t right Jaggard's damaging misappropriation and misidentification of his work T h e r e may or may not have been a serious intention to p u b ­ lish T h e 'staying e n t r y ' of 'as you lyke yt / a booke' on 4 August

of the same year may be analogous T h e chief p u r p o s e of the

entry in the Register of 'sonnetes by W.S.' could have been to p r o ­

hibit further piracy by Jaggard Indeed, the fact that twelve years

elapsed between the two profitable PP printings of 1599 and

Jaggard's expanded edition of 1612 offers some evidence that Jaggard was indeed in some way restrained d u r i n g the intervening years, and obliquely supports the identification of this 'W.S.' with Shakespeare

If t h e 'certain other sonnet es by W.S.' entered for publication

in January 1600 are taken to be Shakespeare's, it is possible to

5

Introduction

speculate a little further on which particular sonnets these may have been O f course, they could have been poems of which we have no knowledge because they never saw the light B u t if the publication, or staying entry, was intended above all to set right

t h e w r o n g d o n e by J a g g a r d , it seems a fair p r e s u m p t i o n that the collection included ' W h e n m y love swears that she is m a d e of

t r u t h ' (PP 1; Son 138) and ' T w o loves I have, of comfort and despair' (PP 2; Son 144), t h e two authentic sonnets with which

The Passionate Pilgrim o p e n e d Both poems, b u t especially the

second, seem to call for a fuller poetic and narrative context in which t h e speaker's treacherous lust and triangular passion are

m o r e fully analysed It is unlikely that t h e g r o u p included the

Love's Labour's Lost p o e m s , since these had already seen print in

t h e 1598 Q u a r t o of t h e play, and presumably also in the lost

' B a d ' Q u a r t o in 1597 Perhaps, t h e n , these 'certain other sonnetes'

included or comprised t h e 'dark lady' sequence, later to appear

as Sonnets 127-54: a sequence of twenty-eight darkly satirical

heterosexual p o e m s whose moral and artistic instability seems to reflect a male disgust with t h e lunar, m e n s t r u a l , cycle alluded to

in their n u m b e r Labelling this g r o u p of sonnets, unpoetically, ' Z o n e 4 ' , K e n t H i e a t t and his collaborators have found in it 'a high p r o p o r t i o n of early rare w o r d s ' , and ' n o late o n e s ' 1 Both external and internal evidence suggest that this sequence may have c o r r e s p o n d e d with the ' s u g r e d S o n n e t s ' referred to by

M e r e s , and that it was essentially complete in 1599, u n d e r g o i n g

no m o r e t h a n a little stylistic tinkering before publication in

1609 T h e o t h e r p a r t of t h e sequence most probably belonging

to a period before 1600 is t h e o p e n i n g 1-17, b u t the a r g u m e n t s for this belong to a later section

T h e r e is n o d i s p u t e about t h e volume to which the S t a t i o n e r s ' Register e n t r y of 20 M a y 1609 refers -

1 Hieatt,'When?', 91

6

Introduction

20 M a y

T h o T h o r p e Entred for his copie u n d e r the handes of

master Wilson and master L o w n e s Wardenes a booke

called Shakespeares sonnettes vjd.1

N o t only is Shakespeare's s u r n a m e here given in full; t h e title

corresponds with that on t h e title-page of Q, ' S H A K E ­

S P E A R E S S O N N E T S ' Exactly w h e n in 1609 t h e volume was published cannot be established, because of t h e r e s o u n d i n g silence into which it fell A note on the back of a letter to E d w a r d Alleyn, dated 19 J u n e [1609], records u n d e r t h e h e a d i n g 'Howshold s t u f f the p u r c h a s e of 'a book S h a k s p e r sonetts 5 d '2 But this is almost certainly a forgery by J o h n Payne Collier, inserted by h i m in a convenient space on an a u t h e n t i c d o c u m e n t ,

as was his habitual practice.3 Collier himself never published this reference, and Rollins records it as Alleyn's,4 b u t it is n e v e r t h e ­ less highly suspect

'Howshold s t u f f would be a curious h e a d i n g u n d e r w h i c h to record the p u r c h a s e of such a book, and it is a p h r a s e r a t h e r s u s ­

piciously c o r r e s p o n d i n g with The Taming of the Shrew,

Induction.2.140.5 In his account books Alleyn frequently refers

to expenditure u n d e r the heading ' H o w s h o l d ' or ' H o w s h o l d charges', b u t not, elsewhere, ' H o w s h o l d stuff'6 - and to write out such a heading for a single fivepenny p u r c h a s e would be rather odd S o m e of t h e letter forms, e s p e c i a l l y ' s ' and 'k', differ somewhat from those in t h e other accounts written above Collier and his assistant Peter C u n n i n g h a m were accomplished and intelligent forgers and fabricators, and seem h e r e to have provided after-comers with what would, if authentic, be m o s t

1 Reproduced in Schoenbaum, Records, 219

2 Reproduced in Henslowe Papers, vol 2, item 12

3 See Race's article in N&Q, note also the succession of further studies of Collier's

activities by the same scholar in the same journal

4 Rollins, 2.54

5 See Race

6 Cf Dulwich College Alleyn Papers M S VIII (1594-1616) and IX (1617-22)

7

Introduction

precious: testimony to t h e precise date of publication of Q , the price at w h i c h it was sold, and its eager acquisition by one of Shakespeare's theatrical associates Sadly, however, it cannot be

t r u s t e d , and if this d o c u m e n t is discounted, we are left with tle evidence of t h e price at which it was sold, t h o u g h an early

lit-o w n e r lit-of t h e H u n t i n g t lit-o n (flit-ormerly Steevens) clit-opy has written

o n t h e title-page ' p r e t i u m - Is - N : L : S:' If a shilling was indeed t h e original selling price, this was a rather expensive quarto T h e survival of thirteen copies, most in good condition, suggests that t h e volume did not u n d e r g o the kind of enthusias- tic t h u m b i n g that destroyed h u n d r e d s of early copies of

Shakespeare's earliest published p o e m , Venus and Adonis Also, whereas Venus and Adonis went t h r o u g h at least sixteen editions

in Shakespeare's lifetime, Shakespeare's Sonnets was not

r e p r i n t e d even once - and this despite the fame of the Jacobean Shakespeare We m i g h t also c o m p a r e the fate of another 1609

publication, Troilus and Cressida, whose q u a r t o was printed early

in t h e year, and of which only four copies survive A s s u m i n g that

t h e size of t h e p r i n t - r u n s was t h e same, the evidence of

survival-rates suggests t h a t Troilus and Cressida was three times as

p o p u l a r a m o n g readers as Shakespeare's Sonnets

T h e reason for t h e popularity of Troilus and Cressida, along

with t h e n u m e r o u s o t h e r play texts published in 1608-10, may lie in a further area of external evidence that provides an i m p o r -

tant context for t h e d a t i n g of Shakespeare's Sonnets T h i s is the

incidence of plague outbreaks, which has been surprisingly neglected by previous scholars Both of Shakespeare's narrative

p o e m s , Venus and Adonis, 1593, and Lucrèce, 1594, had been p u b

-lished d u r i n g plague outbreaks which were severe enough to cause civic orders for t h e public theatres to be closed A conse-

q u e n t loss of income, and a decision to t u r n , instead, to p r i n t publication, looking to a reward from a courtly p a t r o n , readily explains t h e place of these two p o e m s in the chronology of

Shakespeare's works By t h e period of J a g g a r d ' s Passionate

Pilgrim Shakespeare's e c o n o m i c d e p e n d e n c e on, and investment

8

Shakespeare was angry with h i m By 1609, w h e n Shakespeare's

Sonnets finally saw t h e light, his investment in t h e t h e a t r e was

greater still, after t h e K i n g ' s M e n ' s acquisition of t h e Blackfriars building in August 1608.2 Notoriously, t h e d e a t h of Elizabeth and the peaceful accession of J a m e s I in M a r c h 1603 heralded an exceptionally severe and prolonged plague outbreak, w h i c h caused those theatres u n d e r civic control to be closed for nearly thirteen m o n t h s , from M a y 1603 to S e p t e m b e r 1604, with only short intermissions.3 T h o m a s D e k k e r ' s The Wonderfull Yeare

1603 celebrated t h e curious concatenation of J a m e s ' s peaceful

accession and his arrival in L o n d o n with t h e onset of t h e worst plague outbreak in living memory F o r Shakespeare's company, too, this 'wonderful' year - b o t h splendid and terrifying - was to

be greeted

With m i r t h in funeral and with dirge in marriage,

In equal scale weighing delight and dole

(Ham 1.2.12-13)

O n the one hand, they were swiftly elevated to the status of 'King's servants' (on 17 M a y 1603), and the K i n g offered t h e m some economic and artistic protection from the consequences of the plague orders, both t h r o u g h cash gifts and t h r o u g h requests for private performances at H a m p t o n C o u r t and elsewhere B u t

on the other hand, the Globe stood bleakly empty, and as Barroll points out, this above all was 'where the big m o n e y was to be made'4 Since the epidemic was also widespread outside L o n d o n ,

after 1—17, as well as A Lover's Complaint, despite the fact that

neither sonnet sequences nor love complaints were conspicuously fashionable genres by this date.1 B u t as I shall suggest later, both are radical refashionings of genre Perhaps it was only because of the fitful suspension of closure orders d u r i n g August and

S e p t e m b e r 1604, followed by six m o n t h s during which the

theatres were open, that a version of the Sonnets did not see print

in that year

As Barroll has shown, L o n d o n ' s public theatres were para­ lysed once again by closure orders from July 1606 onwards

A p a r t from a brief i n t e r l u d e of playing d u r i n g t h e s u m m e r of

1606, 'plague continued off and o n for three years, until

D e c e m b e r 1 6 1 0 '2 Yet again, T h o m a s D e k k e r was quick to chronicle t h e effects of this prolonged epidemic on the City of

L o n d o n , first in The Dead Tearme, 1608, and then in The Ravens

Almanacke, published early in 1609, in which he prophesied fur­

t h e r plagues to descend on sinful L o n d o n e r s d u r i n g that year In

t h e o p e n i n g passage of Worke for Armor ours, 1609, written in

'this p r e s e n t S u m m e r ' , he specifically described the effect of plague o n playwrights, actors and poets:

Play-houses, stand (like Tavernes that have cast out their

Maisters) the dores locked up, the Flagges (like their

Bushes) taken down, or rather like Houses lately infected,

from whence the affrighted dwellers are fled, in hope to

live better in the Country T h e Players themselves did

1 Cf Nosworthy; Hieatt, 'When?'; Jackson 'Complaint'

2 Barroll, 174

10

Introduction

never worke till now, there Comedies are all t u r n e d to

Tragedies, there Tragedies to Nocturnals, and the best of

them all are weary of playing in those Nocturnal Tragedies

Proh Dolor! their Muses are more sullen then old Monkeys:

now that mony is not stirring O Pittifull Poetry, what

a lamentable prentiship hast thou served, and (which is

the greatest spite) canst not yet be m a d e Free!1

For some reason the authorities still permitted bear- and

bull-baiting: as Dekker went on to say, ' T h e company of Beares hold

together still, they play their Tragi-Comedies as lively as ever they did' So Edward Alleyn, as Master of the Bear G a r d e n , was still in business, and would theoretically have been in a position to buy a

copy of Shakespeare's Sonnets from one of its two L o n d o n book­

sellers, had he so wished N o t many others of his class and economic status remained in L o n d o n that summer By the end of May 1609, when Q^was entered in the Stationers' Register, plague deaths had reached an alarmingly high level In some weeks of April and May deaths from plague in the City of L o n d o n approached a h u n d r e d a week, and it was feared that the total might rise even further, though in fact this was to be its peak As soon as the Easter Law T e r m ended the City was swiftly deserted

by the professional classes, gentry and courtiers, whose business for the time being was done.2 'Shakespeares sonnettes' was entered

in the Register a few days before Ascension Day, which marked the end of the Easter Law T e r m 3 Perhaps something of a last-minute rush attended Shakespeare's sale of the copy manuscript to Thorpe H e may well have been anxious to complete the transac­ tion as quickly as possible before retreating from plague-ridden London for the summer, presumably to Stratford, where there was other business to be dealt with T h e hasty departure of the author,

1 Thomas Dekker, Worke for Armorours (1609), sig B lr

2 Wilson, 120-1; Barroll, 180-1 John Bell, Londons Rembrancer (1665), gives weekly

figures for plague deaths in the City from 1606-10

3 Cf Cheney, 68-9; and Table 16, showing years, including 1609, when Easter Day was on 16 April

11

Introduction

rather than any kind of conspiracy, most probably accounts for

T h o r p e ' s being t h e signatory of t h e dedication

Shakespeare seems n o t to have been in Stratford since the

d e a t h of his widowed m o t h e r the previous September H i s c o n siderable holdings in tithe income, land and commodities all

-n e e d e d to be see-n to, a-nd t h e r e was at least o-ne outsta-ndi-ng piece

of litigation in Warwickshire T h i s was his recovery of a debt of

£ 6 , with 24s interest, from J o h n Addenbrooke, which was c o n cluded at t h e Stratford C o u r t of Record on 7 J u n e 1609.1 T h e

-description of Shakespeare as 'nuper in curia domini Jacob?

('recently at t h e C o u r t of K i n g J a m e s ' ) could suggest that he had lately arrived back in Stratford, and now enjoyed an elevated sta-

t u s in his h o m e town as a ' K i n g ' s s e r v a n t ' ,2 who frequently

p e r f o r m e d at court As E.A.J H o n i g m a n n has shown, this was 'a particularly busy period of Shakespeare's career, when he accepted new responsibilities in L o n d o n , b u t also had to take hold of t h e reins in Stratford, and was detained there against his will'3 S u c h a sequence of events would help to account for the

m e d i o c r e p r i n t i n g of t h e text and t h e a p p a r e n t absence of a u t h orial proof-correction I n d e e d , this may have been a repetition of

-an old p a t t e r n , for b o t h Venus -and Adonis -and Lucrèce had been

entered in t h e Register in late spring, d u r i n g plague outbreaks, after w h i c h s u m m e r journeys to Stratford are probable N e i t h e r seems to have been authorially p r e s s - c o r r e c t e d 4

E x t e r n a l evidence, in conclusion, suggests four probable phases of composition, of w h i c h t h e second and third are highly conjectural

1 Schoenbaum, Life, 183, 192

2 For the documents relating to the Addenbrooke case, see Chambers, Shakespeare,

2.114-16 Curiously, the Addenbrooke affair, for which seven documents survive, is not discussed at all in Bearman, rating only a passing reference on p 31 Schoenbaum, too, describes it as 'leaving a trail of records more numerous than

interesting' {Life, 184)

3 Honigmann, 45

4 Plague may also account for the uniquely bad state of Jonson's The Case is Altera,

also belonging to the summer of 1609 After intervening to correct the title-page, Jonson, too, may have left London, either for the country residence of Sir Robert Cotton or for that of one of his aristocratic patrons (cf Jonson, 3.96)

12

Introduction

(1) ?—1598 S o m e sonnets, at least, m u s t have been written by

the time of M e r e s ' s allusion in Palladis Tamia T h o u g h it is t h e ­

oretically possible that n o n e of the ' s u g r e d S o n n e t s ' referred to

by M e r e s correspond with those eventually published in 1609, it

is rather unlikely, in view of t h e appearance of 138 and 144 in

The Passionate Pilgrim S o m e would also argue that t h e circula­

tion from 1620 or so of m a n u s c r i p t texts of s o n n e t 2 may derive from an earlier version.1

(2) 1599-1600 In the aftermath of The Passionate Pilgrim

Shakespeare may have prepared a collection of sonnets which was entered in the S t a t i o n e r s ' Register on 3 J a n u a r y 1600 Even

if this was merely a 'staying e n t r y ' , not d e n o t i n g any firm i n t e n ­ tion to publish, the Wardens of t h e S t a t i o n e r s ' C o m p a n y would need to see and verify the m a n u s c r i p t

(3) 1603-4 Severe plague outbreak and c o n s e q u e n t loss of

income from the theatre make this a plausible t i m e for Shakespeare to have t u r n e d once m o r e to n o n - d r a m a t i c poetry

A Lover's Complaint and some of t h e ' d a t i n g ' sonnets, s u c h as

107 and 125, appear to belong to this time, which may have been the period in which t h e sequence b e g a n to take its final shape

(4) A u g u s t 1608 - M a y 1609 An even m o r e severe and p r o ­

longed plague outbreak again deprived Shakespeare of income

from the theatre H e may have finished work on Shakespeare's

Sonnets during this period before selling the manuscript to T h o r p e

Internal evidence: the likelihood of revision

Before I examine the two traditional areas of internal evidence for the date of Shakespeare's sonnets, style and topical allusions, something should be said about the general characteristics of s o n ­ nets and sonnet sequences in Shakespeare's period It is fairly obvious that the sonnet, an almost uniquely contained, delimited form of versification, is peculiarly susceptible to tinkering It does

1 Taylor, 'Some MSS'; Kerrigan, 44Iff For a discussion of this claim, see Appendix,

pp 453-7

13

Introduction

not take long to copy out a single sonnet, and in copying it out, whether for a 'private friend' or for other purposes, a poet of a self-critical bent, or one who is sensitive to criticism or changing circumstances, is extremely likely to introduce changes, whether

of single words or of whole lines or quatrains A sonnet sequence, still more, is almost b o u n d to be the p r o d u c t of several second

t h o u g h t s and rearrangements It is remarkably easy to reorder sonnets, either, as Robert Sidney did in his poetical manuscript,

by inscribing different n u m b e r s or directions, such as ' T h i s should be first', beside t h e m ;1 or, if individual sonnets or small

g r o u p s are written on loose sheets of paper, by reshuffling them like a pack of cards T h o s e sixteenth-century sonneteers who p u b - lished sonnet sequences, and became involved in later printings, seem almost always to have revised W h e r e manuscript evidence survives, that, too, generally points to revision T h e pre-eminent sonneteer of Renaissance France, for instance, Pierre de Ronsard,

transformed his 1578 Sonnets pour Hélène into what was in effect

'a new sonnet cycle' in the augmented and revised edition of

1584.2 Likewise, the earliest English 'sonneteer', T h o m a s Watson,

p r o d u c e d one version of Hekatompathia in manuscript for

per-sonal presentation to his patron, the Earl of Oxford, and another, longer, annotated one for print publication a year or so later.3

F u l k e Greville revised his sequence Caelica several times, over a

period of years, at one time shortening it, and at another ing previously rejected sonnets, as the Warwick Castle manuscript shows.4

reinstat-T h e m o s t e x t r e m e example of repeated revision of a sonnet sequence is offered by Shakespeare's Warwickshire neighbour

M i c h a e l D r a y t o n O u t of t h e early Ideas Mirrour, 1594, D r a y t o n eventually generated t h e final version of Idea, 1619, t h r o u g h the

process of at least five revisions O n l y twenty of the original

1 BL M S Add 58435 Robert Sidney, Poems 124 and passim

2 Stone, 228-43

3 BL M S Harley 3277; Thomas Watson, Hekatompathia (1582)

4 Cf Farmer

14

Introduction

fifty-three sonnets included in Ideas Mirrour survived in t h e

1619 sequence As well as writing new sonnets, D r a y t o n m a d e continual verbal and stylistic changes to old ones H e was n o t o ­ riously sensitive to mockery, such as that of Sir J o h n Davies in his 'Gullinge S o n n e t s ' ,1 or M a r s t o n in his Scourge of Villanie;

and he was anxious to adjust his p o e m s to t h e changing r e q u i r e ­ ments of fashion I n d e e d , Shakespeare may allude defensively to

D r a y t o n ' s celebrated versatility in his own s o n n e t 76, o p e n i n g with the question:

W h y is my verse so barren of new pride,

So far from variation or quick change?

In the course of a quarter of a century D r a y t o n transformed a sequence of soft, 'golden', conventionally self-pitying love sonnets into something m u c h more tough, colloquial and unpredictable — as

he himself boasted, 'in all H u m o r s sportively I r a n g e '2 His written, Jacobean sonnets, from the 1605 version onwards, include strong elements of satire and misogyny As Kathleen Tillotson p u t

later-it, writing of the 'sternness and finality' of these poems, ' T h e y are the sonnets of a satirist; even the traditional promise of i m m o r ­ tality m u s t open with a jeer at the "paltry, foolish, painted

t h i n g s " '3 Daniel, too, was a compulsive reviser of his own s o n ­

nets, t h o u g h not on the same grand scale as D r a y t o n H i s Delia went t h r o u g h at least eleven editions from t h e original Delia and

Rosamund in 1592 to the text included in his Whole Workes in

1623, with verbal changes, additions, and some r e a r r a n g e m e n t , but mostly confined to the period 1601-2

With so m u c h evidence available that other, b e t t e r documented sonneteers continually rewrote and reordered their work, it becomes a near-certainty that Shakespeare m u s t have done so too, given that at least a decade elapsed between t h e

Introduction

' s u g r e d S o n n e t s ' alluded to by M e r e s and the eventual e m e r ­ gence of Q : W h a t e v e r t h e order of their original composition may have been, it is m o s t unlikely t h a t it bears m u c h relation to

t h e order of t h e sonnets as finally arranged in Q , although some scholars, strangely, have assumed that Shakespeare did begin to write at 1 and simply carried straight t h r o u g h to 154.1

N u m e r o l o g i c a l finesses, such as t h e play, on the h u m a n body in

20, on ' [ h ] o u r m i n u t e s ' in 60, t h e g r a n d climacteric in 63, and a double climacteric in 126, suggest either that sonnets already

w r i t t e n were subsequently carefully located, or that some were specially written or revised for particular positions in the sequence (For discussion of individual examples, see c o m m e n ­ tary.) Any individual s o n n e t , unless topical allusion can be shown to p e g it to a particular date, may have u n d e r g o n e revision over a period of days, weeks, years or decades I n d e e d , even an

a p p a r e n t l y topical sonnet, such as 107, may, for all we know, be

t h e p r o d u c t of revision, incorporating or adapting topical ele­

m e n t s in a s o n n e t written earlier

D r a y t o n , as K a t h l e e n T i l l o t s o n has s h o w n ,2 was still labour­ ing to impose logic and forcefulness on t h e 'vague conceits' of his early s o n n e t s nearly t h i r t y years later If the only version of his sequence t h a t survived were t h e 1619 one, some of D r a y t o n ' s sonnets would doubtless pose just the sort of stylistic puzzles

t h a t some of Shakespeare's do, with perplexing occurrences of

b o t h 'early rare w o r d s ' and 'late rare w o r d s '3 T h e fact that

scholars a t t e m p t i n g to date Shakespeare's Sonnets on stylistic evi­

d e n c e have ranged from as early as 1582 to as late as 16094 may

n o t simply reflect t h e well-known capacity of these p o e m s to provoke e x t r e m e disagreement It may also testify to the gen­ uinely multi-layered character of t h e sonnets, some of which may have been worked over and tinkered with on different

1 This assumption mars Graziani's otherwise excellent article

2 Drayton, 5.139

3 Cf Hieatt, 'When?', 96-7

4 Rollins, 2.53-77

16

Introduction

occasions at widely spaced intervals T h o u g h H e m i n g e and Condell could not recall finding m a n y blots in the a u t o g r a p h texts of Shakespeare's plays, it is unlikely t h a t his working

papers for Sonnets were so immaculate

Internal evidence: style

T h e pursuit of individual stylistic or verbal links between Sonnets

and Shakespeare's other works leads in many directions Even a trail which at first looks straightforward can quickly prove to lead into a thorny wood T h i s can be illustrated with reference to one example which apparently points to an early date, and another which seems strongly to suggest a late one T o start with the

'early' one: the only line in Shakespeare's Sonnets that is an exact

quotation, 'Lilies that fester smell far worse t h a n w e e d s ' (94.14),

derives from The Reign of King Edward the Third T h i s play was

printed in 1596, b u t may have been written as early as 1591, for the short-lived company of P e m b r o k e ' s M e n 1 W h e t h e r or n o t Shakespeare had a h a n d in t h e writing of t h e play, as m a n y have thought, there is no d o u b t that he was very familiar with it, and

echoed parts of its action in Henry V and Measure for Measure.1

T h i s being so, his quotation of an aphoristic line from it can scarcely be taken as reliable evidence t h a t s o n n e t 94 was written close in time to t h e period of t h e composition, p e r f o r m a n c e or

publication of Edward the Third, 1 5 9 1 - 6 , since he evidently went

on r e m e m b e r i n g and thinking a b o u t t h e play in t h e Jacobean period Indeed, for all we know, Shakespeare may have q u o t e d the line in the expectation that it would be recognized by r e a d ­

ers of the second edition of Edward the Third in 1599, a n d / o r it

may have been in this second edition t h a t h e himself read t h e play with closest attention

T h e quotation may also be evidence against Shakespeare's authorship of t h e play, r a t h e r than in favour of it, since, as L e e maintained forcefully, ' I t was contrary to Shakespeare's practice

1 Cf Proudfoot, 181-2

2 Cf Muir, chs 2-3

17

Introduction

literally to plagiarize himself.'1 O n e of Shakespeare's few other exact quotations, again a single aphoristic verse line, ' W h o ever

loved, t h a t loved n o t at first sight?' (AYL 3.5.82), was included

as an acknowledged tribute to its author, the 'dead s h e p h e r d '

M a r l o w e , w h o had been m u r d e r e d six or seven years before As

You Like It was written O n this analogy, it cannot be safely

assumed t h a t close verbal reminiscence necessarily implies prox­ imity in time to t h e work recalled, w h e t h e r a work by Shakespeare himself or a n o t h e r writer

L o o k i n g to t h e o t h e r end of the chronological s p e c t r u m ,

K e n t H i e a t t has suggested cogently that A Lover's Complaint is strongly linked with o n e of the 'last plays', Cymbeline, with ref­

erence to t h e o c c u r r e n c e of fifteen 'very rare w o r d s ' in both works.2 H e also points out that t h e first quatrain of sonnet 73, ' T h a t time of year thou mayst in m e behold', with its 'bough-leaves—shake-bear complex', is closely analogous both to

a passage in a n o t h e r m a t u r e play, Timon of Athens (4.3.265-8),

a n d , even m o r e , to a speech by Belarius in Cymbeline (3.3.60-4):

then was I as a tree

W h o s e boughs did bend with fruit B u t in one night,

A s t o r m , or robbery (call it what you will)

Shook down my mellow hangings, nay, my leaves,

A n d left m e bare to weather

In combination with the presentation of the speaker, in all three

passages, as a visibly old and dying m a n , the parallels with Timon and Cymbeline might appear to point to sonnet 73 as written close

in time to the two plays Indeed, a period between 1603 and 1609

is what I would personally favour B u t again, it is only honest to acknowledge that Shakespeare's verbal and metaphoric memory was both acute and retentive Writing speeches for traumatized

old m e n in Timon and Cymbeline could have caused him to recall

1 Quoted in Rollins, 2.234

2 Hieatt, 'LC, Cym and Son\

18

Introduction

words and images he had deployed in a sonnet some years earlier And as suggested above, we can never be certain, in default of any early manuscript evidence, that this, or any, sonnet is not the p r o d ­ uct of a complex process of revision, being a rewritten version of one first composed at an u n k n o w n earlier date

M o r e sophisticated stylistic studies, of course, do n o t rely on single examples or parallels, b u t o n large collections of words, images or phrases, which are t h e n c o n n e c t e d with other, m o r e clearly datable, parts of Shakespeare's work, or with t h a t of his contemporaries S u c h work was initiated in t h e late n i n e t e e n t h century, being u n d e r t a k e n particularly systematically by such

G e r m a n scholars as H e r m a n n C o n r a d and G r e g o r Sarrazin,

a m o n g many others.1 T h e i r final conclusions were extremely diverse, as Rollins observed: ' t h e result has often been for m e n and women of presumably equal intelligence to attain d i a m e t r i ­ cally opposed results' Such diversity has continued u n d i m i n i s h e d

in the later twentieth century For instance, T.W Baldwin, a learned S o u t h a m p t o n i t e , p l u m p e d for an initial g r o u p of s o n ­ nets (or quire of paper) completed in 1594, a n d five or six further batches presented to S o u t h a m p t o n annually u p to 1598

or 1599.2 Claes Schaar, in 1962, first assembled a useful collec­ tion of parallels with other Elizabethan sonneteers, and t h e n

trawled links between Sonnets and t h e rest of Shakespeare's o e u ­

vre T h i s led h i m to date o n e g r o u p of s o n n e t s to 1 5 9 2 - 3 , and another to 1594-5 Verbal parallels with Shakespeare's later work are, he suggested, instances of his later d e v e l o p m e n t of a

' g e r m ' whose original site was in Sonnets, b u t w h i c h ' m a y long

have continued to echo in t h e poet's m i n d ' 3 I n 1975, however, Eliot Slater, setting u p a m o r e scientific statistical m e t h o d for analysing the incidence of rare words in Shakespeare's work,

came to the threefold conclusion t h a t A Lover's Complaint is authentically Shakespearean (a view t h e n d i s p u t e d ) ; t h a t Sonnets

1 Rollins 2.63-5

2 Baldwin, 340-4

3 Schaar, 183-94

19

Introduction

belongs to t h e 'second q u a r t e r ' of Shakespeare's work; and that

A Lover's Complaint belongs to its 'third q u a r t e r ' 1

D e s p i t e t h e widely diverse conclusions reached in the past,

t h e r e does seem a chance that c o m p u t e r - a i d e d stylometric analy­ sis, such as that u n d e r t a k e n by K e n t H i e a t t and his collaborators, will o n e day come u p with results that prove m o r e generally compelling t h a n those assembled by all previous searchers T h e

i n t e r i m suggestions offered by H i e a t t in 1991, on the basis of some painstaking and wide-ranging analysis, seem to offer a good working hypothesis, especially if the phrase 'a n u m b e r ' is treated as elastic:

Sonnets is like Daniel's Delia and Drayton's Idea in con­

taining a core of sonnets written in the first half of the fifteen-nineties, but in part revised on into the seventeenth century, and a n u m b e r of new sonnets added to this core.2

However, given the strong probability that any or every sonnet may be the p r o d u c t of revision, combined with the likelihood that the whole sequence was revised and rearranged during the period immediately before its publication, it seems unlikely that stylo- metric analysis can ever produce the whole answer Also, the absolute generic difference between sonnets and plays needs to be

b o r n e in m i n d Shakespeare may have drawn on a range of vocab­ ulary and literary reference when he was writing sonnets that was wholly distinct from what he used when writing plays T h i s may have led h i m on occasion to deploy a 'late rare word' in a sonnet written early, or an 'early rare word' in a sonnet written late For instance, working on sonnet-writing or sonnet-revision towards the end of the possible period of composition could occasionally have p r o m p t e d recollections of words or images from the narra­ tive poems, which he then redeployed many years later T h o u g h

some individual parallels between passages in Shakespeare's

1 Slater, passim

2 Hieatt, 'When?', 98

20

Introduction

Sonnets and Shakespeare's other works are very striking (many,

but of course not all, are pointed out in notes to individual s o n ­ nets), such parallels cannot be taken in isolation as secure evidence

of the date of composition of Sonnets or of its c o m p o n e n t parts

T o command general support, stylometric analysis needs to be considered in conjunction with other kinds of evidence

Internal evidence: topical allusions

Two sonnets, more than any others, have been investigated for the light they appear to shed on the date of composition O n e alludes

to personal history, the other to public events S o n n e t 104, ' T o me, fair friend, you never can be old', chronicles the passage of three whole years 'Since first I saw you fresh', and congratulates the youth for looking no older than he did three years ago If this is taken as referring literally to the period of the speaker's friendship with the fair youth, it might seem that if we could only discover when this began, it would be possible to date this sonnet (and p r e ­ sumably many of its companions) to a time three years later However, many other sonneteers had used a fictionalized t h r e e - year time-scheme T h e s e included Desportes, Vausquelin de la Fresnaie, Ronsard and - one of Shakespeare's most immediate models — Daniel.1 It is also remarkable, t h o u g h perhaps coinci­

dental, that Tennyson, whose In Memoriam has Shakespeare's

Sonnets as its model, imposed a fictional three-year scheme, with

three Christmases and springs, on a collection of lyrics actually written in the course of nearly seventeen years T h o u g h t h e p o s ­ sibility of a literal and personal three-year reference cannot be entirely excluded, we are unlikely to encounter solid d o c u m e n t a ­ tion of the exact calendar of Shakespeare's relationship with his 'fair friend' anywhere outside the sonnets themselves

T h e other m u c h - d i s c u s s e d ' d a t i n g ' sonnet, 107 ( ' N o t m i n e own fears, nor the p r o p h e t i c soul') offers m o r e p r o m i s i n g m a ­ terial for investigation Its account of a peaceful and 'balmy' t i m e

1 Rollins, 1.225-6

21

Introduction

which defeats t h e false prophecies that preceded it clearly alludes to large external events, sufficiently m o m e n t o u s to be well d o c u m e n t e d In an article confidently entitled 'Shakespeare's

s o n n e t s d a t e d ' , Leslie H o t s o n linked it with the year 1589 H e took line 5, ' T h e m o r t a l m o o n h a t h her eclipse e n d u r e d ' , to allude to t h e crescent-shaped formation of the Spanish A r m a d a , defeated in 1588; and he reinforced this dating with reference to

s o n n e t 123, linking line 2's ' p y r a m i d s , built u p with newer

m i g h t ' to Pope Sixtus V's erection of Egyptian obelisks in

R o m e 1 T h o u g h impressively d o c u m e n t e d , H o t s o n ' s theory has

c o m m a n d e d little s u p p o r t It would require us to believe not only in a Shakespeare who took an active interest in cultural events in R o m e , b u t also in one who had mastered the art of writing densely allusive and complex sonnets at the very begin­

n i n g of his literary career

M a n y i n t e r m e d i a t e dates have been suggested,2 b u t the only really convincing o n e is also the most obvious T h e 'wonderful year', 1603, saw t h e eclipse, or death, of the 'mortal m o o n ' Elizabeth, and t h e peaceful accession of J a m e s I, with the release from prison and reception into favour of several leading courtiers Shakespeare's early p a t r o n , the Earl of S o u t h a m p t o n ,

w h o had been c o m m i t t e d to the T o w e r for his part in Essex's rebellion in 1 6 0 0 / 1 was immediately released - ' t h e K i n g ' s first act of his accession to t h e crown of England was to set

S o u t h a m p t o n free (10 April 1603)'3 Shakespeare's later p a t r o n , William H e r b e r t , T h i r d Earl of Pembroke, had jeopardized his position at Elizabeth's c o u r t by his affair with M a r y F i t t o n and

u n d e r w e n t a short spell of i m p r i s o n m e n t in 1601 H e too enjoyed i m m e d i a t e blessings at the h a n d of the new m o n a r c h , being installed as a K n i g h t of t h e G a r t e r on 25 J u n e 1603 T h e 'balmy t i m e ' of 107.9 can be most obviously construed as refer­ ring to the miraculously peaceful period initiated by James's

1 Hotson, 1-36

2 Summarized in Rollins, 1.263-70

3 Sidney Lee, DNB entry on Southampton

22