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By Root 20490 0

designed a collection of three hundred sonnets which he inscribed to ‘hate of a woman,’ and he appropriately entitled them ‘Contr’ Amours’ in distinction from ‘Amours,’ the term applied to sonnets in the honeyed vein. Only seven of Jodelle’s ‘Contr’ Amours’ are extant, but there is sufficient identity of tone between them and Shakespeare’s vituperative efforts almost to discover in Shakespeare’s invectives a spark of Jodelle’s satiric fire. The dark lady of Shakespeare’s ‘sonnets’ may therefore be relegated to the ranks of the creatures of his fancy. It is quite possible that he may have met in real life a dark-complexioned siren, and it is possible that he may have fared ill at her disdainful hands. But no such incident is needed to account for the presence of ‘the dark lady’ in the sonnets. It was the exacting conventions of the sonnetteering contagion, and not his personal experiences or emotions, that impelled Shakespeare to give ‘the dark lady’ of his sonnets a poetic being. She has been compared, not very justly, with Shakespeare’s splendid creation of Cleopatra in his play of ‘Antony and Cleopatra.’ From one point of view the same criticism may be passed on both. There is no greater and no less ground for seeking in Shakespeare’s personal environment the original of ‘the dark lady’ of his sonnets than for seeking there the original of his Queen of Egypt.

IX—THE PATRONAGE OF THE EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON

Biographic fact in the ‘dedicatory’ sonnets.

Amid the borrowed conceits and poetic figures of Shakespeare’s sonnets there lurk suggestive references to the circumstances in his external life that attended their composition. If few can be safely regarded as autobiographic revelations of sentiment, many of them offer evidence of the relations in which he stood to a patron, and to the position that he sought to fill in the circle of that patron’s literary retainers. Twenty sonnets, which may for purposes of exposition be entitled ‘dedicatory’ sonnets, are addressed to one who is declared without periphrasis and without disguise to be a patron of the poet’s verse (Nos. xxiii., xxvi., xxxii., xxxvii., xxxviii., lxix., lxxvii.-lxxxvi., c., ci., cvi.) In one of these—Sonnet lxxviii.—Shakespeare asserted:

So oft have I invoked thee for my Muse

And found such fair assistance in my verse

As every alien pen hath got my use

And under thee their poesy disperse.

Subsequently he regretfully pointed out how his patron’s readiness to accept the homage of other poets seemed to be thrusting him from the enviable place of pre-eminence in his patron’s esteem.

The Earl of Southampton the poet’s sole patron.

Shakespeare’s biographer is under an obligation to attempt an identification of the persons whose relations with the poet are defined so explicitly. The problem presented by the patron is simple. Shakespeare states unequivocally that he has no patron but one.

Sing [sc. O Muse!] to the ear that doth thy lays esteem,

And gives thy pen both skill and argument (c. 7-8).

For to no other pass my verses tend

Than of your graces and your gifts to tell (ciii. 11-12).

The Earl of Southampton, the patron of his narrative poems, is the only patron of Shakespeare that is known to biographical research. No contemporary document or tradition gives the faintest suggestion that Shakespeare was the friend or dependent of any other man of rank. A trustworthy tradition corroborates the testimony respecting Shakespeare’s close intimacy with the Earl that is given in the dedicatory epistles of his ‘Venus and Adonis’ and ‘Lucrece’, penned respectively in 1593 and 1594. According to Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeare’s first adequate biographer, ‘there is one instance so singular in its magnificence of this patron of Shakespeare’s that if I had not been assured that the story was handed down by Sir William D’Avenant, who was probably very well acquainted with his affairs, I should not venture to have inserted; that my Lord Southampton at one time gave him a thousand pounds to enable him to go through with a purchase which he heard he had a mind to. A