Delphi Complete Works of Samuel Butler, page 395
Here, then, we have two canopies born over a great personage on a great occasion, and it does not seem a very forced supposition to think that the footmen who were about the Queen, had some hand in the bearing one or other or both of them, though the pillars would do the greater part of the bearing in the first mentioned canopy. I know what Mr Lee would do if he were arguing my case; he would say: —
In 125 Q, we have a reference that cannot be mistaken to the canopy borne over Queen Elizabeth when 6he went in triumph to St Paul’s, Nov. 24, 1588, surrounded by her pensioners and footmen. It is impossible to doubt that the footmen would hold on by tassels to the fringe of the canopy as those who follow a French funeral hold on to the pall, and thus be considered as bearers. This is 60 absolutely conclusive that no other date than a few days after Nov. 24, 1588, can conceivably be assigned to sonnet 125, Q.
Seriously, without pretending to confidence, except in the opinion that the friendship between Shakespeare and Mr W. H. did not endure for many weeks after the defeat of the Armada, I am inclined to think that if Mr Lee had argued as I have supposed, he would not have been so far wrong as I have sometimes found him.
Roughly, then, I date the Sonnets, adhering to the numbers of my text as follows: —
Sonnets 1 — 97 (1 — 77, Q) between April and December 31, 1585, or January 1, 1585-6.
98 — 116 (78 — 96, Q) between January 1, 1585-6, and early Summer 1586.
117 (97 Q) Autumn 1586.
118, 119 (98, 99, Q) Summer 1587.
120 — 126 (100 — 106, Q) say, March 1587-8 and April 1588.
127 (107 Q) about August 8, 1588.
128 — 148 (108 — 125, Q) between, say, August 10 and December 1, 1588.
I can affix no dates to the sonnets which I have placed as appendices, except that A seems to belong to the time of the earliest sonnets.
CHAPTER XII.
MR. W. H. — CONCLUSION OF INTRODUCTORY
CHAPTERS.
I HAVE said in Chapter III that Tyrwhitt and Malone thought it probable that Mr W. H.’s surname was Hughes, or Hewes, or Hews, as the name was then indifferently spelt. That his Christian name was William seems at once so generally received and so self-evident that I shall not follow Mr Lee in his, as it seems to me, singularly inconclusive attempts to show that the ‘Will’ sonnets (135, 136, 143, Q) contain no play upon the name of Shakespeare’s friend, as well as upon his own.
As regards Mr W. H.’s surname being Hughes, there is considerable presumption that this was so, but no William Hughes can be identified with Mr W. H. unless, inter alia, we can date his birth as having taken place in 1567 or 1568; and though we know of many William Hughes’s, contemporaries of Shakespeare, there is none, except the well-known Bishop of St Asaph, the year of whose birth we can even approximately ascertain. This prelate is out of the question; for he was between 35 and 40 in 1585, and whatever else Mr W. H. may have been we cannot suppose him to have been a Bishop.
As regards other William Hughes’s, seven are mentioned in “Notes and Queries” (5th Series, V, p. 443) not one of them suggesting probable identity with Mr W. H. There was a William Hewes who in 1630 signed a deed of release to Bacon Gawdy, but we do not know how old he then was, and not to know this is to know nothing. Moreover, I cannot think that Mr W. H. was likely in 1630 to he in a position to sign a deed of release to a man so well up in the world as Bacon Gawdy. From “State Papers,” domestic series, for 1631 — 1633, I see there was a William Hughes “guardian of Alexander Ha* * *n,” a ward of King Charles. This man, of age unknown, wanted an allowance from the court to repair the chapel of the church of St Mary Cray, Kent. There is another William Hughes indexed in the same volume. We have no clue to his age; he had denied “Christian burial at Burford, Co. Salop, to the body of William Fox, a gentleman of an ancient house”; he had also taken the body out of the grave, carried it to Greet in a cart, and there thrown it “near a swine stye.” There was a William Hughes, or Hewes (both forms appearing), who after having been “many years” in the navy and served as steward in the Vanguard, Swiftsure, and Dreadnought, applied in 1633-4 for the post of cook, which I learn was rather more highly paid than that of steward; he was appointed, and died in March 1636-7.* This man is quite as likely to have been Mr W. H. as any of the others. There are other William Hughes’s, none of them hopeful to he dug out of “State Papers,” and Mr Lee mentions a musician of the name William Hughes, whose existence, I am now informed, is disbelieved in.
Bearing in mind, then, that for one contemporary William Hughes whose name we know, there must have been many who have left no trace, it is not likely, even though Mr W. H.’s name was Hughes, that we shall learn more about him than what the Sonnets and Thorpe’s dedicatory address reveal to us.
How much is this? That in the spring of 1585 he was more boy than man, good looking, of plausible attractive manners, and generally popular, goes without saying. It is also plain that his character developed badly, and that boy as he was, before the end of the year he had got himself a bad name. He was vain, heartless, and I cannot think ever cared two straws for Shakespeare, who no doubt bored him; but he dearly loved flattery, and it flattered him to bring Shakespeare to heel; moreover, he had just sense enough to know that Shakespeare laid the praise on thicker and more delectably than any one else did, therefore he would not let him go.
In laying, or abetting the laying, of a trap for Shakespeare, we may charitably suppose that he was too young to fully realise the detestable nature of his own action, and he seems to have been bitterly penitent — at any rate for a time. He was forgiven, but before long the intimacy between him and Shakespeare slackened; if I am held to be as approximately right in my dates as I trust I may be, the high fever of Shakespeare’s infatuation did not last beyond mid autumn 1585, if, indeed, so long; from that time onwards, though it again ran high at times, it was intermittent — Mr W. H. playing with him as a cat plays with a mouse. There seems to have been a redintegratio amoris during the first few days after the defeat of the Armada had become known, but before many weeks had passed there was a final break. Whether, if the two men met in after time, Shakespeare passed Mr W. H. strangely, and scarcely greeted him with that sun his eye, or whether a modus vivendi was established between them, we shall never know, but we may be tolerably sure that Shakespeare’s love had cast its utmost sum.
This is as much as we can gather from the Sonnets. From December 1588 to some time not very long before 1609 Mr W. H.’s history is a blank, but — say at the end of 1608 for want of a more exact date — he allowed the Sonnets — and we may assume also that wonderful poem, “A lover’s complaint” — to pass into Thorpe’s hands — the Sonnets being, probably, for reasons given in Chapter XI, in the order in which Shakespeare wrote them. The question arises why he should have done this.
He must have known that the publication would be exquisitely painful to Shakespeare. Ruined love when it is built anew may sometimes, though not often, grow fairer than at first, but the ruins of a ruined love that after having been loved so well but so unwisely had fallen over its rotten foundations many a long year since, and whose object was like enough now as bald and fleshy as he was disreputable — of a love, too, that had been fraught with such a hideous episode — can any sight be conceived more ghastly for one whose nerves were not of brass or hammered steel? One shudders to think how Shakespeare’s gorge must have risen at seeing the skull of his dead folly dug up and tossed about in public. To suppose that he sanctioned the unburying is to deny the commonest instincts of humanity to the most human of all poets, and to suppose that Thorpe and Mr W. H. did not know the pain their action would cause, is to place their intelligence on a par with their brutality.
The wonder, however, is, that well as Mr W. H. must have known how heartless his action was, he must also have known that the eternity conferred upon him by our ever-living poet was of a very unenviable kind. Badly as we must think of him, we must credit him with knowing this much, and it is probably because he knew it, that he had kept the Sonnets for twenty years without parting with them. Why, then, after having held them back so long should he have let a low publisher like Thorpe give to the world so much that reflected so severely upon himself? The only explanation I can think of is that he was in great straits for money, and was glad of the few shillings which were all that Thorpe would be likely to give him for the copy.
If he had been well to do, and anxious on mere literary grounds that the Sonnets should not be lost, a very small sum would have enabled him to print them, and keep the edition under his own control. It is not a large assumption to suppose that he would have omitted the few sonnets from which we have alone collected the infamous trap already too often referred to, and a few others from which it appears that he was generally disesteemed. That he did not withhold these points strongly to the opinion that he could not do so — the bargain being that Thorpe was to have the whole series, and to do what he liked with it. I hardly think, however, that Mr W. H. parted with Shakespeare’s original MS.; for while most of the errata in Q suggest errors of a printer’s eye, many strongly suggest the careless listening of one who was writing from dictation. In Chapter IX I have given my reasons for thinking that the misplacement of sundry sonnets in Q is due, not to Mr W. H. but to Thorpe.
There is no reason to suppose that either Mr W. H. or Thorpe bore any ill-will to Shakespeare; money difficulties on the part of the first, and the hope of making a few pounds on that of the other, will explain their action, though nothing can excuse it. Neither of the two men seem to have prospered. Thorpe (“State Papers,” domestic series, 1635) probably ended his days in an almshouse at Ewelme — and let ns hope that Mr W. H. died peacefully as cook on board the Vanguard.
The worst of it is that all we who read the Sonnets are accessories after the offence. We are receivers of stolen goods; we are as one who opens and pores over a series of letters addressed to another person, and many of them of a most private nature. Shakespeare’s letters — for this is what the Sonnets are — have fallen by stealth into our hands; they are the unguarded expression of the inmost feelings of one whose privacy should have been more especially and particularly sacred. Thorpe’s iniquity causes us to set aside every known canon of honourable conduct — and yet is there one of ns who could find it in his heart to make an honest man of himself by cancelling that iniquity, and wiping the Sonnets out of existence were it in his power to do so?
The doing of such a right would be a wrong greater than that which it was intended to remove. For after all, the greatness of Mr W. H.’s and of Thorpe’s guilt is swallowed up in that of the service they have rendered. Their sin must go scot free by reason of its very enormity — as also must ours in partaking with them. One does not know whether to be more thankful for the righteous deed of Heming and Condell, than for the unrighteous one of Thorpe and Mr W. H. If Heming and Condell had not published the First Folio, we should still have had some twenty of Shakespeare’s plays, and among these Hamlet — but if Thorpe and Mr W. H. had not been scoundrels, we should have had nothing of the Sonnets, except the two that were published in The Passionate Pilgrim — and who could have guessed that these were fragments of such a series a3 that from which we now know that they were derived?
I cannot see that the Sonnets are in any respect less priceless than the Plays, except in so far as they are less in volume. True, they have something more than their intrinsic worth by reason of our knowledge that they heralded Hamlet and The Tempest, but do not these plays gain in equal measure by our knowledge that they were heralded by the Sonnets? Does not each explain how the other should have been possible? Do we not feel on reading Hamlet that even though the Sonnets had been lost we should have had (as we best could) to presuppose them? and do we not, on reading the Sonnets, cease to wonder that the man who could write them should presently have conceived Hamlet? It is little more than a truism to say, that as it is only the writer of the Plays who could have written the Sonnets, so it is only the writer of the Sonnets who could have written the Plays, and that if there had been no Sonnets going before, so neither would there have been a Hamlet or a Tempest following after.
Moreover in the Plays there is a veil at all times over the face of their author. He looms large behind it as the Armada behind sonnet 107 Q; we feel the mightiness of his presence, but we never see him. In the Sonnets we look upon him face to face; there is no let or hindrance to our gazing on the millions of strange shadows that play round him, nor on the millions of shadows that he can lend. We see the man whom of all others we would most wish to see, in all his beauty, in all his sweetness, in all his strength, and, happily, in all his weakness — for in the very refuse of his deeds there is a strength and warrantise of skill which it were ill to lose.
Of course there is another side to all this; let us take it from Hallam: —
Notwithstanding the frequent beauties of these sonnets... it is impossible not to wish that Shakespeare had never written them. There is a weakness and folly in all excessive and misplaced affection, which is not redeemed by the touches of nobler sentiments that abound in this long series of sonnets. But there are also faults of a merely critical nature. The obscurity is often such as only conjecture can penetrate; the strain of tenderness and adoration would be too monotonous, were it less unpleasing; and so many frigid conceits are scattered around, that we might almost fancy the poet to have written without genuine emotion, did not a host of other passages attest the contrary.
There are few at the present day who will not read the above with something like amazement that it could have been written in this century. Tennyson said well,
The slow sad hours that bring us all things ill,
And all good things from evil, and it not rarely happens that the lot falls upon the very greatest men to be cursed with that inability to think as every man thinks, which shall balance for ill, at any rate for a time, the greatness of their good endowments. The greater the gifts of the good fairies at a man’s birth, the more certainly will a bad fairy step in to mar them; the only comfort is, that without its due proportion of knaves and fools the world would be even more knavish and foolish than it is. It would go mad of its own sanity. And after all, when a man is naturally good, there is no such ‘eukrateia’ as that which has been begotten in him by a modicum of ‘mania’.
To regret, moreover, that Shakespeare should have written the Sonnets is to regret that he was Shakespeare; we must not wish to tinker such a man as he was; he must be taken as time and circumstance for better or worse determined him, or let alone: his is indeed a case in which it were sinful,
... striving to mend
To mar the subject that before was well?
Happily neither God nor man can do it, for God cannot alter the past.
A man’s style is the essence of the man himself. Never truer saying passed the portals of a man’s lips than this of Buffon’s — for whatever the exact words he spoke may have been, this is what he meant. It is one of the common-places of modern schoolmen to say that the man and his art — whether literature, painting, music, or what not — are not to he taken as one, but that the corrupt tree may bring forth good fruit, and vice versa. There is no truth in this. The corrupt tree may yield specious fruit which shall be sweet, sweet, poison to the tooth of the corrupt taster, but a healthy appetite will have none of it. If the work is wholesome, genial, and robust, whatever faults the worker may have had were superficial, not structural. No man is without sin;
.... where’s the palace whereinto foul things
Sometimes intrude not? Who has a breast so pure,
But some uncleanly apprehensions
Keep leets and law days, and in session sit
With meditations lawful?
I have repeatedly seen it said in these last few years that Love’s Labour’s Lost — which, as we have seen, was perhaps the earliest of Shakespeare’s Plays — contains more personal notes than any of the others. I think this is true, and believe that I detect one of these notes in the words put into the mouth of Biron,
For every man with his affects is born,
Not by might mastered, but by special grace.
It is the old saying — The Lord hath mercy on whom be will have mercy and whom he willeth he hardeneth; but if ever a style carried conviction that the grace which should enable its owner to master his affections had not been withheld from him, that style is Shakespeare’s. One of the Bishops said of Handel — quoting from Much Ado about Nothing,
The man doth fear God, howsoever it seems not in him by some large jests he will make.
Much Ado about Nothing is not generally reputed an early play, and the context raises no supposition that a personal note was being consciously or even sub-consciously struck; but no words can be more unconsciously personal as applied to Shakespeare himself, than these which Don Pedro half mockingly applies to Benedick. Let us, then, face the truth, the whole truth, but let not either speech or silence suggest, as is now commonly done, a great deal more than the truth concerning him.
One word more. Fresh from the study of the other great work in which the love that passeth the love of women is portrayed as nowhere else save in the Sonnets, I cannot but be struck with the fact that it is in the two greatest of all poets that we find this subject treated with the greatest intensity of feeling. The marvel, however, is this, that whereas the love of Achilles for Patroclus depicted by the Greek poet is purely English, absolutely without taint or alloy of any kind, the love of the English poet for Mr W. H. was, though only for a short time, more Greek than English. I cannot explain this.
