The Complete Works of William Shakespeare - Israel Gollancz William Shakespeare [3385]
When winter had cast off her weed
Our sun eclipsed did set. Oh! light most fair.
At the same time James was constantly said to have entered on his inheritance ‘not with an olive branch in his hand, but with a whole forest of olives round about him, for he brought not peace to this kingdom alone’ but to all Europe.
Allusions to Southampton’s release from prison.
‘The drops of this most balmy time,’ in this same sonnet, cvii., is an echo of another current strain of fancy. James came to England in a springtide of rarely rivalled clemency, which was reckoned of the happiest augury. ‘All things look fresh,’ one poet sang, ‘to greet his excellence.’ ‘The air, the seasons, and the earth’ were represented as in sympathy with the general joy in ‘this sweetest of all sweet springs.’ One source of grief alone was acknowledged: Southampton was still a prisoner in the Tower, ‘supposed as forfeit to a confined doom.’ All men, wrote Manningham, the diarist, on the day following the Queen’s death, wished him at liberty. The wish was fulfilled quickly. On April 10, 1603, his prison gates were opened by ‘a warrant from the king.’ So bountiful a beginning of the new era, wrote John Chamberlain to Dudley Carleton two days later, ‘raised all men’s spirits . . . and the very poets with their idle pamphlets promised themselves’ great things. Samuel Daniel and John Davies celebrated Southampton’s release in buoyant verse. It is improbable that Shakespeare remained silent. ‘My love looks fresh,’ he wrote in the concluding lines of Sonnet cvii., and he repeated the conventional promise that he had so often made before, that his friend should live in his ‘poor rhyme,’ ‘when tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass are spent.’ It is impossible to resist the inference that Shakespeare thus saluted his patron on the close of his days of tribulation. Shakespeare’s genius had then won for him a public reputation that rendered him independent of any private patron’s favour, and he made no further reference in his writings to the patronage that Southampton had extended to him in earlier years. But the terms in which he greeted his former protector for the last time in verse justify the belief that, during his remaining thirteen years of life, the poet cultivated friendly relations with the Earl of Southampton, and was mindful to the last of the encouragement that the young peer offered him while he was still on the threshold of the temple of fame.
X—THE SUPPOSED STORY OF INTRIGUE IN THE SONNETS
It is hardly possible to doubt that had Shakespeare, who was more prolific in invention than any other poet, poured out in his sonnets his personal passions and emotions, he would have been carried by his imagination, at every stage, far beyond the beaten tracks of the conventional sonnetteers of his day. The imitative element in his sonnets is large enough to refute the assertion that in them as a whole he sought to ‘unlock his heart.’ It is likely enough that beneath all the conventional adulation bestowed by Shakespeare on Southampton there lay a genuine affection, but his sonnets to the Earl were no involuntary ebullitions of a devoted and disinterested friendship; they were celebrations of a patron’s favour in the terminology—often raised by Shakespeare’s genius to the loftiest heights of poetry—that was invariably consecrated to such a purpose by a current literary convention. Very few of Shakespeare’s ‘sugared sonnets’ have a substantial right to be regarded as untutored cries of the soul. It is true that the sonnets in which the writer reproaches himself with sin, or gives expression to a sense of melancholy, offer at times a convincing illusion of autobiographic confessions; and it is just possible that they stand apart from the rest, and reveal the writer’s inner consciousness, in which case they are not to be matched in any other of Shakespeare’s literary compositions.