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The Arrangement and the Date of Shakespeare's Sonnets
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
There are so many, points at issue regarding Shakespeare's Sonnets,—the authenticity of the Quarto arrangement, the question of their autobiographical interest, the date, the identity of W. H., of the Dark Lady, and of the Rival Poet,—there has been so much written on all these problems, and the solution of them is so wholly a matter of conjecture, that I shall be obliged for the most part merely to record my own convictions and refer to rather than repeat the sets of arguments which have led me to one opinion instead of to the contrary view; and even in presenting what I offer as my own contribution to the subject I must omit many if not most of the minor considerations which have influenced me.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1915
References
1 The Quarto Arrangement of Shakespeare's Sonnets, in Anniversary Papers by Colleagues and Pupils of George Lyman Kittredge, Boston, Ginn, 1913.
2 It is no answer to Mr. Walsh's excellent introduction and rearrangement to say, as one critic does, that no one will accept any one else's order. We need not believe, as Mr. Walsh points out, that the folio order of the plays was chronological, even though we do not agree as to what the order was.
3 Sir Sidney Lee notes that Sonnet 21 may be addressed to a woman. Professor Alden cites 21–24, 29–30, 46–47, 99, 115–116 as examples of those that “would be thus interpreted were it not for their connection with those in which a person of the other sex is referred to” (p. 285, n).
4 Sonnets 100–125 may have come to his hand in a single manuscript. See below, with reference to the italicized words. Thorpe was, of course, right in supposing 1–17 early and 100–125 later sonnets. This accounts (if it is necessary to account) for the fact noted by Dowden that the pronoun thou preponderates in the earlier Sonnets and you in the series 100–125. Nothing is to be made of the use of the pronouns from 50 to 100, where they are apparently used at haphazard. One might carry this kind of argument to almost any length. The opening sequence of 17 Sonnets might be divided into a group of thou sonnets, 1–12, in which we have only a general friendliness and fondness, and a second group, 13–17, of you sonnets (except for Sonnet 14), where we have a deepening of tone and a manner of greater intimacy.
5 But note my later reservation on this point.
6 Beeching, p. lxv.
7 I am obliged to notice that the mistake of printing “their” for “thy” comes twice in the sequence 33–35, 40–42 (in 35), and that it comes once in the intervening Sonnets 36–39 (in 37); so that the manuscript itself must have contained this faulty arrangement (which is not at all against my theory), or the pages of this manuscript were shuffled. It is possible, however, that the “their” in 37, line 7, is not a misprint.
8 Mr. Wyndham has made an elaborate ex post facto effort to account for all the words which are italicized, and even for all the capitals. He does not try to account for the fact that other words which by analogy should be so marked are not so, nor for the inconsistency where the same word occurs.
It seems futile to try to account for the fancy of some reader of one of the manuscript groups who may have indicated as significant, for example, the word “Autumn” in Sonnet 104, perhaps supposing that Shakespeare was using the word in its frequent metaphorical sense, or who may have thought (or known) that “every Alien pen” had special point as referring to the Rival Poet.
As I shall not recur to this matter of the italicized words, I may as well say frankly that the type of pun contained in the line
“ A man in hue, all hews in his controlling,
seems to me so uncharacteristic that the italicized word gives us the only name which Shakespeare's friend could not have borne. If Shakespeare used this sort of cryptogram, then there is little to say against the Baconian theory.
9 Shakespeare's Complete Sonnets, Unwin, 1908. Mr. Walsh considers each sonnet as a law unto itself, and he breaks up the obvious sequences rather needlessly. Still, one who came to the Sonnets for the first time in his edition would, I think, gain a truer impression of their meaning and their value than he would from the Quarto arrangement.
10 The only comment I have found in favor of the “literary exercises” view which is not fully answered by other writers on this subject is that suggested by Price (in Studies in Honor of Basil S. Gildersleeve, 1902). Professor Price noted that Shakespeare was most successful in the sonnets containing the highest proportion of native words, and he counted, assorted, proportioned, and tabulated all the metrical features of the Sonnets to show with what expedients the young experimenter most expeditiously sped,—forgetting that it is precisely the genuineness of the emotion that most often and most surely produces the remarkable “effects” of the greatest sonnets.
11 Sonnets 82, 83, however, could not have been written to Southampton, who had twice received Shakespeare's “dedicated words.”
12 Life and Works of Shakespeare, p. 124. Mr. Acheson devotes a whole book to the elaboration of this impossible theory.
13 Dean Beeching says that “Mistress Mary Fitton turns out when her portraits are examined to be conspicuously fair” (p. xlii). I agree with Professor Alden that the attempt to find out the name of the Dark Lady is not only impossible but impertinent. (Introduction to The Sonnets, p. xx, in “The Tudor Shakespeare.”)
14 In this connection one may remember the articles by Archer and Lee in the Fortnightly Review, December, 1897, and February, 1898, wherein each critic makes the “Mr.” impossible for the opposing theory.
15 “Romeo, Rosalind and Juliet,” in Modern Language Notes, November, 1914.
16 Frank Harris, The Man Shakespeare, Kennerley, 1909.
17 “Everything that I have written has the closest possible connection with what I have lived through, even if it has not been my own personal—or actual—experience.” Letter of Ibsen to Passage. Goethe, objective as he is, frequently testifies to his use of his own experiences.
18 Love's Labours Lost was published in 1598, with the words “As it was presented before her Highness this last Christmas. Newly corrected and augmented by W. Shakespeare.” If this first quarto was published after March 25, the reference would be to the Christmas of 1597. But a play at court does not look as if Shakespeare were wholly out of favor with fortune in this year.
19 “The Original Version of Love's Labour's Lost” has not yet been sent out for publication, but an abstract of it may be found in the Proceedings of the American Philological Association for 1911 (Vol. xlvi).
20 For example by McClumpha in Modem Language Notes, June, 1900.
21 One must allow some time for a friendship to ripen and for “a play to be written. I should like, if I could, to get the beginning of the friendship, and such sonnets as 1–17, as early as 1595. Sarrazin argues for the date 1592–6, with Sonnet 104 as a point of departure, in the Jahrbuch, xxxiv, p. 368.
22 I say this under correction. I may easily have overlooked instances to the contrary. “Thou” is, of course, used in apostrophizing the dead; and Laertes, who has thou'd Hamlet in his rage, also thou's him after giving him his mortal wound.
23 In this connection see Beeching, p. xxxi, and Butler, passim. The dedications of Verms and Adonis and of Lucrece of course use the appropriate “you.”