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was born in 1580, and who first came to live in London in the year 1598-the year in which Meres proclaimed the Sonnets to be then extant among Shakspeare's "Private Friends."

According to Brown's reading the Sonnets are not Sonnets merely, but consist of groups that form six poems in the Sonnet-stanza. He tells his readers that if the printers in 1609 had received efficient directions the order and manner of these six poems would have run thus:

First Poem. Stanzas 1 to 26. To his friend, persuading him to marry. Second Poem. Stanzas 27 to 55. To his friend, who had robbed him of his mistress, forgiving him.

Third Poem. Stanzas 56 to 77. To his friend, complaining of his coldness, and warning him of life's decay.

Fourth Poem. Stanzas 78 to 101. To his friend, complaining that he prefers another poet's praises, and reproving him for faults that may injure his character.

Fifth Poem. Stanzas 102 to 126. To his friend, excusing himself for having been some time silent, and disclaiming the charge of inconstancy.

Sixth Poem. Stanzas 127 to 152. To his mistress, on her infidelity.1 Brown considered that Sonnets 135, 136, and 143, containing puns on the name of "Will," were quite out of keeping with the rest on account of their playful character. He seems not to have known that Sonnet 57 was another of these; possibly he never saw the original Quarto. The last two Sonnets he left out. The 145th stanza was rejected on account of its metre, and the 146th Sonnet was to be deleted because of its religious nature; this being too solemn as the others were too trivial. Without adducing anything like evidence from within the Sonnets, and in defiance of all the testimony that can be collected from without, Mr. Brown was proudly satisfied in assuming that Shakspeare was not only a self-debaser, but was also a self-defamer of a species that had no previous type and has produced no after-copy. The theory is that Shakspeare discovered a particular species of the forbidden fruit and tried to keep the Tree all to himself. But his young friend Will Herbert found it out and ate of it in the same stealthy manner as he himself had done. Sooner or later the "two thieves kissing" the same mistress found each other out, and they had a "hell of time." Mr. Brown says "we can scarcely imagine Shakspeare in a fit of rage; such, however, was the fact. He was stung to the quick, and his resentment, though we are ignorant of the manner in which it was shown, appears to have been ungovernable!" (p. 63).

After the Fall which followed his eating of the forbidden fruit Shakspeare sat down to carve his cherry-stones into pretty likenesses of the facts, or in other words, to make a record of his sins and sufferings in Sonnets as an offering of his everlasting love thus dedicated to the man who had perfidiously partaken of his paramour! No one knows better than myself that ridicule is not the test of truth, but my case is not going to rest on ridicule if I do laugh a little at what I look upon as madly ridiculous. It is true that Mr. Brown most charitably forgives Shakspeare for doing what he has gratuitously charged him with doing, i. e. "keeping a mistress." He says piously enough, "May no person be inclined on this account to condemn him with a bitterness equal to their own virtue. For

1 Shakspeare's Autobiographical Poems. Charles Armitage Brown. London, 1838.

myself, I confess I have not the heart to blame him at all-purely because he so keenly reproaches himself for his own sin and folly" (p. 98). One is thankful to find that Mr. Furnivall also forgives him freely and offers him absolution with extreme unction. He appears to hold that these wantonly imputed sins of blood and slips in sensual mire have conferred on our poet a character quite Biblical. Thus he compares Shakspeare with David and looks upon the Sonnets as his Psalms. There never were any authentic grounds for making such a charge or for placing Shakspeare in such disreputable company, or beslavering him with the unction of cant; nothing whatever to go upon except those poetic appearances and shadows of some kind or other of facts which have played the fool with the Brownites, who have falsified them in their malodorous rendering of the Sonnets.

Mr. Furnivall supposes that we fight against the Autobiographic theory of the Sonnets to save Shakspeare from the charge of adultery. Not at all. Give us the facts and we will face them frankly. I do not fear facts nor war against them. My battle is set in array against fictions, fallacies, forgeries, and groundless assumptions, not against facts. But we deny that you have ever made out any case of Adultery. We deny your possession of the facts. We deny that you, who are too subjective-minded to get out of your own conceited selves, have taken the measure of our great Dramatist, whose power of going out of himself and assuming other forms of personality was Protean and humanly unparalleled whether he wrote Plays or Sonnets. We deny that you have ever plumbed or penetrated deep enough, or ever given sufficient proofs of profound insight in reading the Sonnets. We deny the accuracy of your gauge and the truth of your interpretation. We reject your version of the circumstantial data concealed in the Sonnets as calumnious, incredible, and impossible; and we charge you with taking advantage of the obscurity, like others that come by night, to vilify the man Shakspeare and vitiate his work. We see and say that you have never known the man to whose acquaintanceship you pretend. When we ask for proof you smoke a sooty figure on the ceiling and call that a likeness of Shakspeare. You have made the Flower-Garden of the Southampton Sonnets common as a place that is haunted with the ghost of dead drink and the foul breath of bad tobacco. They will need to be disinfected for a while, so that clean people can freely breathe their natural sweetness.

What we repudiate from the first is the puerility of supposing that if our Poet had been an adulterer he would have written Sonnets on the subject to perpetuate his personal and for-ever-to-be-reflected shame, when (as he tells us) the subjects were suggested by this friend, and the Sonnets were written to be the living record of his friendship, his loving memorial in life, his "gentle monument" in death; were intended to contain the Poet's "better part," "the very part was consecrate to thee" (Sonnet 74, written after the supposed "adultery"). I look upon this imputation as an utterly unwarranted attempt to make us think ignobly of the man, and a most unique specimen of dilettante devilry. It is not as if Mr. Brown had been inspired by the passion for essential truth, and made blind with earnestness on Shakspeare's behalf! Neither he nor his imitators had or have any such excuse. Their foolish conceit is that in some surreptitious way they can get at the "inner workings" of the Poet's nature, having caught him this time without the mask, and found him out. But Shakspeare is not to be "found out" by the one-eyed people. He was all eyes him

self, and each eye had as many facets for conduct, guidance, and self-protection as those of the fly. As a matter of course any casual reader might assume at first sight that Shakspeare's Sonnets would be personal to Shakspeare. As the true saying is, "any fool can do that." Therefore it is not surprising that this revelation of Shakspeare's guilt came upon Mr. Brown at a flash. Most of us at first sight have fancied the Sonnets were wholly personal to the writer of them. That is, we took it for granted they were personal to Shakspeare. But those who take things for granted, or who adopt a false view and act upon it, may do as Othello did, and as others have done, who murdered by mistake. Such was the position of an old Shakspearian who says in a letter to me

"Six years ago I wrote and read a paper on the Sonnets declaring at that time for the Personal Theory. I still remember how greatly the difficulties presented by that theory dissatisfied and depressed me, and how I was forced to the conclusion that those difficulties never could be surmounted. I have now read and re-read your exhaustive work again and again, and I can only say that you have made a blind man see. Whereas I groped in the dark before, I now walk under a strong light, and can read with apprehension and delight those beautiful poems that I used to read with a feeling of impatience and vexation. I feel greatly indebted and grateful to you for having relieved me from the burden of an immense difficulty." Another old Shakspearian wrote to me as follows

"Having just finished your very interesting book on Shakspeare's Sonnets, I cannot deny myself the pleasure of thanking you for your e'oquent vindication of Shakspeare's personal character, and for the new and clear light by which you enable the world to read and comprehend those exquisite pieces of poetry.

"As one of the many admirers of these Sonnets, I have always been perplexed by their import, regarding them as autobiographical; but now that I can view them as having been written to and for others, their beauty and intensity appear to me to be wonderfully enhanced by the glowing spirit of love and devotedness which gives them a double life. Let me congratulate you on the completeness and fulness of your noble task, for which all lovers of Shakspeare must be grateful to you."

But it cost me three years of intense thought and patient labour to free myself entirely from this delusion. At length I found that the path attempted by Mr. Brown was of no more avail for making way through the maze than that of the drunken man whose wooden leg stuck so fast in the earth that he stumped round and round it all night without getting any forwarder, but believing all the while that he was on his way home. That picture or parable, if grotesque, is by no means an unfair or extravagant representative of the personal theory! I found that the difficulties all lay in the details which Brown had avoided and never attempted to cope with, nor even pretended to understand. Just where the Sonnets are the fullest of arresting matter, and the surface is most craggy with obstructive facts, which Brown could not get over or explain away, he had to shirk the difficulty by suggesting that the Sonnets were no doubt intended to be left vague (p. 63). Although there is nothing indefinite in his indictment of Shakspeare and his young friend!

Those readers who will insist on the Sonnets being solely Autobiographical are seeking to cross the sea by dry land. They keep on making the attempt like those migratory Norwegian rats of which we read, who never do succeed, but who at least have the excuse that there was a land-passage once where the water drowns them to-day. The chief contents of the Sonnets never have been

and never can be made personal to Shakspeare. The long fight against an adverse fate, the spite of fortune, and the tyranny of time; the banishment and wanderings abroad, the public disgrace and vulgar scandal, the unfaithfulness in friendship, the frailties of sportive blood, the sins and sufferings, the cries of repentance, the confessions of his blenches, the defiance in thinking good what others think bad, the pitifully false excuses and abject servility, all belong to a speaker who is NOT Shakspeare. These things can no more be made personal to our Poet by any racking of ingenuity or reach of an emasculate imagination than the sea can be taken on board the ship. With the Autobiographical theory all is discord and dissonance; whereas the semi-dramatic rendering serves to bring harmony out of a chaos of sights and sounds; and as Bacon tells us, it is the harmony which of itself giveth light and credence. For this semi-dramatic

interpretation in its final form I now ask an attentive hearing.

It was in consequence of mistaking the confessions of the Sonnets as Autobiographical that Hallam wished they had never been written. Schlegel read them in the same way, as wailings over a wasted youth; the Poet's Book of Lamentations. Writers like Carlyle and Emerson, who could recognize the great self-sufficing strength and almost imperturbable tranquillity of this placid, joyous nature; who accredit him with the calm of an unfathomable depth as mirror to the world around, can also sigh over the sad secrets of a darkly troubled spirit divulged in the Sonnets. "It has to be admitted after all," said Emerson, that "this man of men, who gave to the science of mind a new and larger subject than had ever existed, and planted the standard of humanity some furlongs forward into chaos-that he should not be wise for himself-it must even go into the world's history that the best Poet led an obscure and profane life." And solely because the Sonnets have been misrepresented by loquacious libellers, and wise men have been foolish enough to echo their babblings, instead of questioning their credentials. When truly understood the Sonnets will reflect the same man as do the Plays. The same writer was one in both. But when the mirror has been fractured by the stone-thrower it can but give back an image of the man shockingly distorted and hideously disfigured. Surely it is high time that all this scandal-mongering concerning Shakspeare's Sonnets and his "Swarthy Siren" was brought to book, and the hypothesis of that Worshipful fraternity of the Sireniacal Gentlemen" confuted once for all. Shakspeare's fair fame is at root the property of the nation, not to be fly-blown. or infected by the suspicions of pretended experts who keep on sending forth their smuts that stick where they fall on the youthful mind like "blacks" upon the skin of the face.

To the genu ne lovers of the man it ought to be a matter of prime importance that this Sonnet-question should be fairly met and finally settled. We must be ignorant hypocrites to continue talking as we do on the subject of our great Poet's character, and believe what we do of his virtues, his moral qualities, his manly bearing, if these Sonnets are personal confessions, having the character ascribed to them by the autobiographobist. And if they be not, then all lovers of Shakspeare will be glad to get rid of the uncomfortable suspicions, see the "skeleton taken to pieces, and have the ghost of the Poet's guilt laid at once and for ever; so that wise heads need no longer be shaken at "those Sonnets," and fools may not wag the finger with comforting reflections upon the littleness of great men.

Where is the use of trying to gauge the Art and Mind or take the measure of the man Shakspeare, or to get his writings correctly classified, whether by the two-feet-and-eleven-fingered or any other kind of rules, if we are all the while be-darkening the truth with the shadow of a lie, by adopting the wrong reading of his Sonnets as to the times when they were written and the personal characters of the speakers self-portrayed? All that has been said by Mr. Furnivall about Shakspeare's" Unhappy third period" is as false as the foundations are unsound; and the falsehood of his misleading inference is solely based upon the fundamental fallacy of the Autobiographic theory of the Sonnets. No biography of our Poet can be safely built with this shifting sand of the Sonnets at the foundations.

One notices that in later writings upon Shakspeare's life and character there has been a growing diffidence on the subject, if not an actual desire to leave the Sonnets alone. Men who have attained their mental maturity begin to shake their wiser heads (as did the late Mr. Spedding) at this juvenile invention of Armitage Brown's and its unfortunate aberrant effect on the mind of his follower, Mr. Furnivall. If we have been deceived by a manufactured mystery, and imposed upon by a got-up ghost of Shakspeare's guilt, which only needs facing to be found out, the sooner we know the real truth the better. The primary question is not whether Shakspeare ever did keep a mistress who was "swarthy, fickle, and serpent-like," as Mr. Furnivall avouches; nor is it whether he entered into irregular relationships with a male friend and a female fiend, nor whether this trinity in unity fell out when the peer and poet quarrelled and the firm of Shakspeare and Co. dissolved partnership-it has not come to that because no evidence has ever been presented-not one jot-for a case to be called in court or a hearing to be granted. The first question is whether the Sonnets say and substantiate these things that have been surmised and asserted by Brown and the feeble chatterers who echo him. This I deny. This I shall disprove.

Professor Dowden appears to think that I look upon the Brownite and Autobiographobist view as the result of "intellectual obliquity." That is a mistake. The obliquity is manifest enough, but it is non-intellectual.

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As we see, no one ever left a cleaner record than Shakspeare's. The total testimony of his time tells of a character that was beyond reproach. Those who knew him best did not perceive the flaws and frailties, the stains of his sins of blood and slips in sensual mire. Ben Jonson says with underlined emphasis, "He was indeed honest." "He sowed honestly," says John Davies. Besides," says Chettle, "divers of worship have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty." Publishers and players vie with each other in testifying to his uprightness and manly worth. No doubt the Elizabethans had as ke.n a scent for scandal as the Victorians may have, and liked their game to be as high; such things as our Poet has been supposed to charge himself with could not have escaped, unnoticed and unknown. In this world it is easy enough at any period of history, and in any station of life, for some of the personal virtues to be overlooked by whole "troops of unrecording friends." These may nestle and make sweet some small breathing-space of life, and pass away without being remembered in gilt letters. But the Vices! That is quite a different matter. And such vices too in such a man as Shakspeare, who was watched by so many jealous looks on the part of those who used the pen and could sharply prick in the record with it. His vices could not have nestled out of sight quite so

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