share in my certitude of the particular Sonnets being still earlier than the Poems and Plays.

Fer ile and lavish as he was, Shakspeare is prone to repeat himself. Moreover, he wrote with unparalleled rapidity, and work done in Play or Sonnets at a heat would and does leave its mark of the time on both. It is so in his Plays, and the same law must apply to the Poems and Sonnets.

These, however, are not merely flowers of the same season; they are frequently the same flowers transferred from the Sonnets to the Plays. For we may be certain sure that such matter as we find in Venus and Adonis would not be presented first to Southampton in a printed poem, and afterwards repeated and re-presented to him privately in the Sonnets! The first-fruits of the Poet's thought and personal affection would naturally and necessarily be offered in the private work which he had to do; whereas, according to the chronology of Mr. Tyler and other Herbertists, Shakspeare must have gone on repeating himself in the Sonnets from his public Plays all along the line of his progress.

Thus the Sonnets themselves supply ample proof in various kinds of evidence, and in a regular sequence, that a large number of them were written too early for William Herbert to have been their "begetter," or the friend who is the object of Shakspeare's affection. Many of them were written by the Poet's "Pupil Pen" before he had ventured to appear in public: therefore, before he printed in 1593. On other grounds it will be shown, from internal evidence, that another group was written before the death of Marlowe, in the same year. Consequently, these must belong to the "Sonnets among his private friends, which were known to Meres in 1598; and, as William Herbert did not come to live in London till the year 1598,1 and was then only eighteen years of age, he cannot be the person addressed in these Sonnets during a number of years previously!

There could be no kind of reason why Shakspeare should write a series of Sonnets for the purpose of urging a boy of thirteen, or it may be of ten or eleven years of age, to get married immediately! No reason why this impubescent youth should have been addressed by the man Shakspeare with pathetic reproaches for not entering the state of matrimony! He is letting his ancestral house fall to decay," which "Husbandry in honour might uphold "he is

"Seeking that beauteous roof to ruinate,

Which to repair should be thy chief desire."

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This boy-begetter would be charged with "making a famine where abundanc lies "-he would be told to look in the glass and

"tell the face thou viewest,

Now is the time that face should form another;

Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.

For where is she so fair whose uneared womb

Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?"

"Now stand you on the top of happy hours;

And many maiden-gardens yet unset

With virtuous wish would bear your living flowers."

And this is assumed without evidence or question to be written by Shakspeare to a lad who could not have been over thirteen years old, and may have been only 1 Sydney Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 43.

ten, at the time the first Sonnets were composed; as we have the facts under Shakspeare's own hand and warranty. This is a demonstration not likely to be successfully assailed by my opponents if they should ever dare to grapple with my argument.

At the outset of our inquiry, then, it is established that William Herbert cannot be the man whom Shakspeare urged to marry, to whom he dedicated eternal love; and to all who can fairly weigh the facts, it must be just as evident that Henry Wriothesley was the patron and friend whom our Poet loved, and by whom he was so much beloved.

Amongst the few precious personal relics of Shakspeare are those two short prose epistles in which he inscribes his two poems to the Earl of Southampton. They are remarkable revelations of his feeling towards the Earl. The first is shaded with a delicate reserve, and addressed to the patron; the second, printed one year afterwards, glows out full-hearted in a dedication of personal love for the friend. The difference is so great, and the growth of the friendship so rapid, as to suggest that the Venus and Adonis may have been sent to the Earl, or at least written, some time before it was printed.

The dedication runs thus :

Right Honourable,-I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my unpolished lines to your Lordship, nor how the world will censure me for choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burthen: only, if your Honour seem but pleased, I account myself highly praised, and vow to take advantage of all idle hours, till I have honoured you with some graver labour. But, if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shal be sorry it had so noble a godfather, and never after ear so barren a land, for fear it yield me still so bad a harvest. I leave it to your honourable survey, and your Honour to your heart's content; which I wish may always answer your own wish, and the world's hopeful expectation.

Your Honour's in all duty,

WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE.

Now, as our Poet had distinctly promised in Sonnet 26, that when he was ready to appear in print and put worthy apparel on his "tattered loving," he would then dare to boast how much he loved his patron and friend, and show his head, where he might be proved, we cannot but conclude that the dedication to the Venus and Adonis is in part fulfilment of the intentions expressed in that Sonnet. In fact we see the Sonnet was as much a private dedication of the Poet's first poem, as this epistle was afterwards the public one, and know that in it he as much promised the first poem, as in the prose inscription he promises the future Lucrece, when he vows to take advantage of all idle hours till he has honoured the Earl with some graver labour. Therefore, the person who was privately addressed in "written embassage as the Lord of Shakspeare's love, must be one with him whom the Poet afterwards publicly ventured to a ldress as such, in fulfilment of intentions already recorded. The feeling of the earliest Sonnets is exactly that of this first public inscription; it is reticent and noticeably modest, whilst in each there is an expression that gives the same personal image. "Your honour's in all duty" echoes the voice of the Sonnets which were sent to "Witness Duty." In the first Dedication the Poet hopes that his young patron may answer to the "World's hopeful expectation," and in the first of all the Sonnets this Lord of Shakspeare's love is salute l as "the world's fresh ornament

and only Herald to the gaudy Spring." In both we have Hope a-tiptoe at gaze on this new wonder of youth and beauty, this freshest blossom of noble blood. In the next year, 1594, Shakspeare dedicated his poem of Lucrece to the Earl of Southampton as follows :

The love I dedicate to your Lordship is without end, whereof this pamphlet, without beginning, is but a superfluous moiety. The warrant I have of your honourable disposition, not the worth of my untutored lines, makes it assured of acceptance. What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have devoted yours.1 Were my worth greater my duty would show greater; meantime, as it is, it is bound to your lordship, to whom I wish long life, still lengthened with happiness. Your Lordship's in all duty, WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE.

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were my

Again the dedication echoes the 26th Sonnet. "The warrant I have of your honourable disposition, not the worth of my untutored lines," and worth greater, my duty would show greater," are the prose of the previous words, "to witness duty, not to show my wit." Then we have the "lord of our Poet's love," to whom his service was vowed, his duty bound in "vassalage," identified in the person of Lord Southampton, to whom Shakspeare is in duty bound, as in the Sonnet which says, "thy merit hath my duty strongly knit ; and to this lord the Poet has sent his "Books" in private, and now publicly dedicated all that he has done, and all that he has to do. Thus we have it recorded in 1594, by Shakspeare himself, that the relationship of Poet and patron was so close, the friendship had so far ripened, that Shakspeare could dedicate "love without end," and he uses these never-to-be-forgotten words:"What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have devoted yours." That is, the Earl of Southampton is proclaimed to be the lord of our Poet's love, the man to whom he is bound, and the patron for whom he has hitherto written, and for whom, as is understood betwixt them, he has yet to write. "What I have to do is yours -so there is work in hand-" being part as you are in all that my duty and love have devoted to your service." What work in hand devoted to Southampton can this be, save the Sonnets which he was then composing? Here is a promise made which was never fulfilled in any other shape. As we have seen, he made a promise in the 26th Sonnet which he fulfilled in 1593 with the Venus and Adonis. In his inscription to that poem, he makes a further promise, this he carries out in dedicating the Lucrece to the Earl of Southampton. In the second public inscription, he speaks still more emphatically of work that he has to do for the Earl, not like a poet addressing a patron, but as a familiar friend alluding to something only known amongst friends. It is a public promise respecting work that has a private history; its precise speciality has never yet been fathomed, although something marked in the meaning has been felt; it could only have had fulfilment in the Sonnets, and that in a particular way.

The Sonnets themselves respond to the dedications. They show that Shakspeare was in duty bound to write and was expected to write oF and FOR his

In the Malone and Grenville copies this reads "being part in all I have, devoted yours," which punctuation has been preserved. But it is so obviously an error of the press as not even to demand a passing remark. It is obstructive to the sense, and severs what Shakspeare meant to clench by his last repetition of "yours."

E

friend, who in Sonnet 83 has reproached him for not writing when he has been remiss. The Poet says,

"This silence for my sin you did impute."

Again, in Sonnet 100, he apologizes for being so long silent. He reproaches his Muse with her forgetfulness, and bids her

"Sing to the ear that doth thy Lays esteem."

This then was what the Poet had to do, and he lets us know plainly enough that he is doing it in writing his Sonnets to and for Southampton. Hence he calls these poems the "Barren tender of a Poet's debt." The debt contracted with the public as witness, in the Dedication to Lucrece, is not only acknowledged privately in the Sonnets, we see him in the act of writing it off in that mode of fu'filling his promise and paying his debt.

As the Venus and Adonis was printed in 1593, we might safely assume that the first Sonnets, inclusive of the 26th, were not written later than the year 1591 or 1592. But it may have been still earlier. Tom Nash in his Anatomie of Absurdity affords us good ground for thinking that Shakspeare had been heard of as a writer of Sonnets and Songs as early as the year 1590. He refers to a playwright, and sneers at his "Country grammar knowledge." He damns the audacity of this fellow who is setting up as a poet and is already being patronized, to the knowledge and disgust of Nash, as a writer of Sonnets! This would-be Poet he treats as one of a very low kind in the following tirade:

"What will they not feign for gain? Hence come our babbling ballets and our new-found Songs and Sonnets which every red-nose fiddler hath at his fingers' end, and every ignorant all-knight breathes forth over the pot as soon as his brain waxeth hot. Were it that the infamy of their ignorance did redound only upon themselves, I could be content to apply my speech otherwise than to their Apuleyan ears; but sith they obtain the name of our English poets, and thereby make men think more basely of the wits of the country, I cannot but turn them out of their counterfeit livery, and brand them on the forehead, that all men may know their falsehood. Well may that saying of Campanus be applied to our English poets :They make poetry an occupation; lying is their living, and fables are their moveables.' It makes the learned sort to be silent, when, as they see, unlearned sots [are] so insolent. These bussards think knowledge a burthen, tapping it before they have half tunned it, venting it before they have filled it, in whom that saying of the orator is verified, Ante ad dicendum quam ad cognoscendum veniunt. They come to speak before they come to know. They contemn Arts as unprofitable, contenting themselves with a little country grammar knowledge, God wote. kind of poets were they that Plato excluded from his Commonwealth; and amiss it were not if these, which meddle with the art they know not, were bequeathed to Bridewell, there to learn a new occupation; so those rude rithmours, with their jarring verse, alienate all men's mindes from delighting in number's excellence, which they have so defaced, that we may well exclaime with the poet, Quantum mutatus ab illo."

Such

Nash wants to class this new poet with the old Minstrels, who were but wandering rogues and vagabonds in the eye of the law. We have the Shakspearian echo to this complaint in Love's Labour's Lost, "Tush! none but

minstrels like of Sonneting," at the very time when the King and his courtiers have all turned Sonneteers.

It is quite in keeping with our knowledge of Shakspeare that he should have been recognized thus early by Nash as the writer of Songs and Sonnets. His exquisite lyrical faculty is shown by the song to Sylvia in the Two Gentlemen of Verona. In Love's Labour's Lost and the Midsummer Night's Dream it is already in full flower. The collection of his Songs and Sonnets in the Passionate Pilgrim was based upon his reputation as a lyrist. Some of these were very early work.

1

In his Epistle to Greene's Menaphon Nash sneers at the ambitious but futile efforts of "those that never were gowned in the University," and nothing could have made him feel worse than to hear that this ignoramus with no college credentials had found favour as a poet with the young Earl of Southampton, the artful man of art being preferred to the men of Arts, the unlearned to the Learned; a fellow in "counterfeit livery," who would feign anything for gain, being employed to write Sonnets and honoured with the patronage which belonged by right to the educated and authorized academical flunkey. This would be all the more galling and unendurable as Nash and Southampton were both Cambridge men, and both of St. John's College. Nash passed B.A. in 1585, and was expelled some time in 1587 for the part he took in the play entitled Terminus et non Terminus. The Earl of Southampton was admitted Dec. 11, 1585, and passed B.A. June 6, 1589. This early recognition of the Upstart Player, whose education was limited to a Country Grammar School, as a writer of Sonnets, is not to be faced by the Brownites and Herbertists. It is not to be thought of that Shakspeare should have been known as a Sonneteer when Herbert was but ten years old, consequently this recognition by Nash is unanimously ignored by them, as it is by Mr. Furnivall in his lengthy Introduction to the Leopold Shakspeare.

This Player-poet aimed at by Nash is as certainly Shakspeare as is the "Shakscene" denounced later by Greene; and this is one of the earliest and most important of all the contemporary notices of the rising man. Nash's denunciation applies to a playwright who is recognized as being the author of Sonnets, and it follows that if the man of "Country Grammar knowledge" is Shakspeare, then Shakspeare had been heard of in the year 1590 as a writer of Sonnets. Therefore the earliest Sonnets composed for Southampton may have been begun in 1590. There is nothing opposed to this in the dates. Henry Wriothesley was born in the year 1573. He came to London in June 1589, and entered himself as member of Gray's Inn when he was sixteen years of age. Nor is there any difficulty in the way of an early meeting between him and Shakspeare. The young Earl's fondness for Plays is well known. Shakspeare's great affection and love for him were proclaimed to all the world in his prose dedications. And Southampton's step-father, Sir Thomas Heneage, was then Treasurer of the Chamber and Vice-Chamberlain of Her Majesty's Household, as well as Captain of the Guard to the Queen. Thus Southampton's immediate access to players and playwrights would be made easy on account of his stepfather's official relationship to them, and his own influence in their favour would be eagerly sought. In 1589 Southampton was travelling abroad, but was back 1 According to Gabriel Harvey, in his Trimming of Thomas Nash, the latter was of seven years' standing in 1587.