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By Root 19364 0

those poems of the youth’s gifts and graces. Every compliment, in fact, paid by Shakespeare to the youth, whether it be vaguely or definitely phrased, applies to Southampton without the least straining of the words. In real life beauty, birth, wealth, and wit sat ‘crowned’ in the Earl, whom poets acclaimed the handsomest of Elizabethan courtiers, as plainly as in the hero of the poet’s verse. Southampton has left in his correspondence ample proofs of his literary learning and taste, and, like the hero of the sonnets, was ‘as fair in knowledge as in hue.’ The opening sequence of seventeen sonnets, in which a youth of rank and wealth is admonished to marry and beget a son so that ‘his fair house’ may not fall into decay, can only have been addressed to a young peer like Southampton, who was as yet unmarried, had vast possessions, and was the sole male representative of his family. The sonnetteer’s exclamation, ‘You had a father, let your son say so,’ had pertinence to Southampton at any period between his father’s death in his boyhood and the close of his bachelorhood in 1598. To no other peer of the day are the words exactly applicable. The ‘lascivious comment’ on his ‘wanton sport’ which pursues the young friend through the sonnets, and is so adroitly contrived as to add point to the picture of his fascinating youth and beauty, obviously associates itself with the reputation for sensual indulgence that Southampton acquired both at Court and, according to Nash, among men of letters.

His youthfulness.

There is no force in the objection that the young man of the sonnets of ‘friendship’ must have been another than Southampton because the terms in which he is often addressed imply extreme youth. In 1594, a date to which I refer most of the sonnets Southampton was barely twenty-one, and the young man had obviously reached manhood. In Sonnet civ. Shakespeare notes that the first meeting between him and his friend took place three years before that poem was written, so that, if the words are to be taken literally, the poet may have at times embodied reminiscences of Southampton when he was only seventeen or eighteen. But Shakespeare, already worn in worldly experience, passed his thirtieth birthday in 1594, and he probably tended, when on the threshold of middle life, to exaggerate the youthfulness of the nobleman almost ten years his junior, who even later impressed his acquaintances by his boyish appearance and disposition. ‘Young’ was the epithet invariably applied to Southampton by all who knew anything of him even when he was twenty-eight. In 1601 Sir Robert Cecil referred to him as the ‘poor young Earl.’

The evidence of portraits.

But the most striking evidence of the identity of the youth of the sonnets of ‘friendship’ with Southampton is found in the likeness of feature and complexion which characterises the poet’s description of the youth’s outward appearance and the extant pictures of Southampton as a young man. Shakespeare’s many references to his youth’s ‘painted counterfeit’ (xvi., xxiv., xlvii., lxvii.) suggest that his hero often sat for his portrait. Southampton’s countenance survives in probably more canvases than that of any of his contemporaries. At least fourteen extant portraits have been identified on good authority—nine paintings, three miniatures (two by Peter Oliver and one by Isaac Oliver), and two contemporary prints. Most of these, it is true, portray their subject in middle age, when the roses of youth had faded, and they contribute nothing to the present argument. But the two portraits that are now at Welbeck, the property of the Duke of Portland, give all the information that can be desired of Southampton’s aspect ‘in his youthful morn.’ One of these pictures represents the Earl at twenty-one, and the other at twenty-five or twenty-six. The earlier portrait, which is reproduced on the opposite page, shows a young man resplendently attired. His doublet is of white satin; a broad collar, edged with lace, half covers a pointed gorget of red leather, embroidered with silver thread; the white trunks