describes as "the ambush of young days"; considering also the licence of the times, Shakespeare's bitter punishment, and still more bitter remorse-is it likely that there was ever afterwards a day in his life in which the remembrance of that "night of woe" did not at some time or another rise up before him and stab him? nay, is it not quite likely that this great shock may in the end have brought him prematurely to the grave? Considering, again, the perfect sanity of all his later work; considering further that all of us who read the Sonnets are as men who are looking over another's shoulder and reading a very private letter which was intended for the recipient's eye, and for no one else's; considering all these things-for I will not urge the priceless legacy he has left us, nor the fact that the common heart, brain, and conscience of mankind holds him foremost among all Englishmen as the crowning glory of our race-leaving all this on one side, and considering only youth, the times, penitence, and amendment of life, I believe that those whose judgement we should respect will refuse to take Shakespeare's grave indiscretion more to heart than they do the story of Noah's drunkenness; they will neither blink it nor yet look at it more closely than is necessary in order to prevent men's rank thoughts from taking it to have been more grievous than it was.

Tout savoir, c'est tout comprendre-and in this case surely we may add-tout pardonner."

T

CHAPTER TEN: ON THE DATES OF THE SONNETS

HOSE WHO BELIEVE THAT LORD SOUTHampton was the friend to whom Shakespeare addressed the greater number of the Sonnets can date the beginning of the series approximately-for the earlier ones are addressed to a smooth-faced youth who was hardly likely to be more than eighteen, and may well have been a few months younger. Lord Southampton was born in October 1573; adding, say, eighteen years to this date, the earlier sonnets should have been written in the second half of 1591, when Shakespeare was twenty-seven and a half years old, while if my own numbering (which is virtually that of Q) be accepted as chronological, sonnet 124 (104 Q) should be dated in the second half of 1594. The remaining twenty-four sonnets cannot on the Southampton theory be dated with certainty, but should be supposed to have followed sonnet 104 at no very distant date.

By a like process of reasoning those who take Mr. W. H. to have been William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, will date the Sonnets as between 1598 and 1601 or 1602, for Lord Pembroke was born in April 1580. With the dismissal, however, of the claims of both these noblemen, all clue to the date of the Sonnets derivable from their ages disappears, and we are driven back upon the internal evidence of the Sonnets, and what few meagre notices of them we can find elsewhere.

As regards these last they are limited to the fact that Francis Meres in his Palladis Tamia, published in 1598, speaks on p. 282 of Shakespeare's" sugred Sonnets among his private friends." It is probable that he was alluding to some, at any rate, of those with which we are familiar. Again in 1599 Jaggard printed the two sonnets 46 and 52 (138, 144 Q), but this does not prove that any of the later ones had yet been written. Practically, then, we have no evidence for the dates of any of the

sonnets but what we can gather from the poems themselves.

Let us go through them as numbered in my own text. In sonnet 2 we find that the writer holds a man of forty to be "old." Forty years will have dug deep trenches" in the field of Mr. W. H.'s beauty; at forty his eyes will be "deep sunken "; he will feel his blood cold, and must be contented with seeing it warm in the veins of his offspring. In short he is a decrepit old man with one foot in the grave. I cannot think I am forcing a conclusion when I hold that this sonnet can only have been written by one who was still very young. I should say that twenty-one would be quite old enough for him. I therefore tentatively date this sonnet, and I assume also sonnet 1, as written in the spring of 1585-say, for convenience' sake, at the beginning of April, shortly after the beginning of the official year. I dare not lay much stress on the words in sonnet 1:

Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament
And only herald to the gaudy spring,"

but they would be less appropriate if written in any other season than that of early or middle spring.

The same opinion as to the senility of a man of forty (or indeed six and thirty) may be gathered from sonnet 3. When Mr. W. H.'s son-for Shakespeare never contemplates the possibility of the son's turning out to be a daughter-reaches his father's present age of about eighteen, Mr. W. H., " despite of wrinkles," will be able to look "through windows of his age" and see his present golden time in the person of another. But he will not be over six and thirty, or seven and thirty at the outside, for the baby is to be set on foot at once. The opinion of the writer that a man is broken down and old, say, at thirty-seven, is indeed less obvi

ously expressed in sonnet 3, but the unconsciousness with which it has escaped him is even more convincing as to what he really thought than the directer statement of the preceding sonnet. I again infer that twenty-one years is a reasonable age to give him, of course I mean provisionally. The reader will note that the provisional acceptance of, say, mid-April 1585 as the date of the first three sonnets commits me to the date, say mid-April 1588, as that of sonnet 124 (104 Q), and I am bound to get the intervening ones within these two dates by the light of whatever hints I may gather from the Sonnets

themselves.

In sonnet 16 Shakespeare speaks of his "pupil pen." Malone quotes Steevens as thinking this expression to be "some slight proof" that the Sonnets were Shakespeare's earliest compositions. The earliest date commonly assigned to the first seventeen sonnets is 1593 or 1594. By this time Shakespeare had written " Venus and Adonis," "The Rape of Lucrece," and is confidently believed to have written Love's Labour's Lost, Romeo and Juliet, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and at any rate parts of other plays; all these plays are assigned to 1592 and still earlier years. It is incredible that in 1594 he, being then thirty, should speak of his writings as those of a mere beginner. Still more incredible would it be that he should do so at the later date which the Herbertites would assign to the Sonnets. The words

my pupil pen " will, I believe, suggest to most readers more strongly than they seem to have done to Steevens that in the Sonnets we have Shakespeare's first essays in writing. In this case 1585 seems a very reasonable date for the opening sonnets.

Against this must be set the fact that Shakespeare, in his dedication of "Venus and Adonis " to Lord Southampton, calls it "the first heir of his invention "; he may well, however, have so called it, though aware

that he had already written a large number of sonnets. Shakespeare had never seen Shakespeare's Sonnets bound together, and thus made to seem more intentionally articulated than they really are. They prove to be in great measure articulated, but this was the doing of time and circumstance, not of invention. No one considers his occasional letters whether in prose or verse as heirs to his invention; they are determined for him both as regards incident and incidence, and he knows neither the facts nor their grouping inter se till time reveals them; they are Fortune's bastards, not begotten in wedlock with a subject chosen beforehand and developed according to the writer's ideas concerning their fittest exposition. The preface, therefore, to "Venus and Adonis " does not militate against the view that the Sonnets were Shakespeare's first essays in poetry.

Again, as we have just seen, he had written several plays before he published "Venus and Adonis," and if he did not hold these as "heirs of his invention," still less would he so hold the Sonnets. A concise and formal preface cannot go into details; if "Venus and Adonis was Shakespeare's first elaboration of a set subject, and if it was his first published work, this would be enough to justify him in calling it the "first heir of his invention." Of course he ought to have put a parenthesis after these words, in some such precious phrase by all the Muses filed as the following:

"To be strictly accurate, however, I should inform your honour that I have also written a considerable number of Sonnets, and some few Plays, none of which have been published, and which I esteem unworthy of your honour's attention."

Shakespeare perhaps thought that this would be a little long, and that the existence of other unpublished works might be allowed to go without saying. Moreover he knew nothing of eminent Shakespearean scholars.