Shakespeare

The first of them are overtly addressed to a young man, who is encouraged to marry and to breed so that his beauteous image may persist in the world. There has been endless speculation about the recipient of this loving advice, and for many biographers the palm must be awarded to the Earl of Southampton. He had refused to marry Lady Elizabeth deVere, granddaughter of Lord Burghley, and that is supposed to be the occasion for the early sonnets – commissioned, so it is said, by his irate mother. But this imbroglio occurred in 1591, an early date for the composition of the sonnets, and by the more likely date of 1595 Southampton had begun a notorious liaison with Elizabeth Vernon.

A more appropriate candidate appears to be William Herbert, the future Earl of Pembroke. In 1595, at the age of fifteen, he was being urged by his immediate family to marry the daughter of Sir George Carey; but he refused to do so. This might have been the spur for Shakespeare’s early sonnets. Since William Herbert’s father was the patron of the company for which Shakespeare acted and wrote plays, it would have been natural for him to ask Shakespeare to provide some poetical persuasion. The poems, alternatively, may have been written at the instigation of William Herbert’s mother, the illustrious Mary Herbert; she was the sister of Sir Philip Sidney, and the presiding spirit of a literary coterie in which Shakespeare played a part.

There was another fruitless marriage plan for William Herbert, concocted by his family in 1597, which could have provided a similar opportunity. But the reluctance of the fifteen-year-old Herbert seems a better context for Shakespeare’s advice. It may also help to clear up the confusion concerning the publisher’s later dedication to “Mr. WH.” Could this not be William Herbert, surreptitiously addressed? It would help to explain Ben Jonson’s cryptic dedication to Herbert on the publication of his Epigrammes in 1616, “when I made them, I had nothing in my conscience, to expressing of which I did need a cypher.”

William Herbert entered Shakespeare’s life at an opportune moment, but the connections between them can only be puzzled out of inference and speculation. The First Folio of Shakespeare’s works was dedicated to him, and to his brother, Philip, Earl of Montgomery, and in the course of that dedication the author is described to the Pembrokes as “your seruant, Shakespeare.” Of the plays, it is stated that the Pembroke brothers “haue prosequuted both them, and their Author liuing, with so much favour” and that “you will use the indulgence toward them, you have done vnto their parent.” There is also a reference to their lordships’ “liking of the seuerall parts, when they were acted.” This implies some deep reserve of affection, and respect, towards Shakespeare. It has sometimes been suggested that noblemen so eminent as the Pembroke brothers would not have formed any attachment for an actor and playwright, but that is not the case. William Herbert, in particular, was to lament the death of Richard Burbage in 1619 and to write from Whitehall to the Earl of Carlisle that “there was a great supper to the French Ambassador this night here, and even now all the Company are at the play, which I being tender-harted could not endure to see so soone after the loss of my old acquaintance Burbadg.”³ The loss of his other old acquaintance, William Shakespeare, three years before, had no doubt aroused similar sentiments.

There have been many attempts to construct a coherent narrative out of Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence. The first seventeen are overtly concerned with pressing matrimony upon the sweet boy whom the poet addresses, but thereafter the sonnets assume a more intimate and familiar tone. The young man is addressed as the poet’s beloved with all the range of contrary feelings that such a position might inspire. The poet promises to confer immortality upon him but then bewails his own incapacities; the poet adores him but then reproaches him with cruelty and neglect; the poet even forgives him for stealing the poet’s mistress.

Then the sequence once more changes direction and sentiment, with the final twenty-seven sonnets concerned with the perfidy of a “Dark Lady,” by whom the poet is obsessed. The sonnets are also caught up in the soul of the time, with the politics and pageantry of the period, with its informers and flatterers, with its spies and its courtiers, all invoking the panoply of the Elizabethan state lying behind the impassioned speech of the poet to his beloved.