I've already had to revise this ahead of the Portsmouth Poetry Society meeting on the Sonnets (20th April). Tomorrow night, tune in if you dare, for an audacious attempt to review Shakespeare's Bastard, the Life of William Davenant by Simon Aandrew Stirling.
If the readers of
Shakespeare’s sonnets knew what the dedication meant when they were published
in 1609, they were better off than we are now. 400 years later it is one of the
most mysterious as well as most debated of the several pieces of first hand
documentary evidence that biographers have but, given the number of
interpretations it is open to, it raises more questions than it answers.
For the most part, Mr. W.H.
has been assumed to be either Henry Wriothesley, the third Earl of Southampton
or William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, who are both identified by biographers as the ‘fair youth’ addressed
in the poems. From their portraits, Southampton
appears to be the fairer whereas Pembroke had more connection with the theatre
but both would have been possible patrons of such work and ready recipients of
the flattery of a poet, which in those days was embarrassingly overdone by
today’s standards.
However, academics and
researchers are ingenious in finding new angles and it has also been suggested
that the typesetter left off an ‘S’, and Shakespeare himself is the dedicatee
because it should have read ‘To Mr. W. SH.’ Typesetters and copyists are
regularly charged with carelessness if it facilitates a new theory. One might
have thought such an error would have been noticed during proof reading. More
reasonably, though, it has been suggested that Mr. was an insufficiently
respectful form of address for one of the nobility, and although it’s possible
that both Southampton and Herbert are the fair youth at various times, it would
have been a daring manoeuvre to tell both of them that they were the dedicatee,
or perhaps that was left ambiguous.
However, we’ve hardly started
yet. All the words in the dedication are divided by a full stop except H and
ALL which has a space as well. This, it has been explained, was ‘a known cipher
of the time (that) used full stops to indicate a space between words. Where an
actual space occurred, the words on either side were meant to be joined
together’. Furthermore, Will Hall was a name used by Shakespeare during
undercover activity, like spying, and that Shakespeare didn’t oversee the
publication of the first edition of the sonnets but they were put together to
reveal him as a Catholic insider as well as adulterer, and from there the
possibilities become more and more mind-boggling.
T.T. is nearly always assumed
to be Thomas Thorpe, the publisher, but even the evidence of those initials
isn’t clear cut. Among an impressive number of insights in his Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Don
Paterson points out that the dedication is in two halves and suggests that the
first part is ‘by our ever living poet’ and the second part added by Thorpe.
It would be difficult for so
few words to contain any more ambiguity than these. If a ‘begetter’ is one that
causes something to come into being then it could mean the poet, addressed by
the publisher, but it could also mean the one that inspired the poems. The use
of initials rather than naming the dedicatee specifically is almost wilfully
vague, especially if the initials are reversed. The adventurer has numerous
possibilities, most obviously meaning a traveller but perhaps otherwise an
adventurer into poetry or something else. And since the two earls are third
earls and the first poems encourage the fair youth to marry and have children
in order to preserve his beauty in the next generation (which the youth seems
reluctant to do), the use of the word ‘forth’ could refer to a fourth earl. Don
Paterson, despite his own reading of ‘unset’ in line 6 of Sonnet 16, thinks
that theory is ‘garbage’ and he’s usually a good judge. ‘Set forth’ probably
just means ‘publish’.
At 400 years distance from
the sonnets, we are now up against usage of words that has shifted since these
were written as well as a different understanding of relationships. In the
early C17th, the poet or artist wasn’t quite the revered figure they can be now
and they depended on patronage for their living rather than the adoration of
admirers of their own and the affection that one young man has for another in
the poems was more commonly expressed in friendship without sexual overtones
than we are accustomed to now. On the other hand, Shakespeare didn’t continue
to father children as prolifically as many of his contemporaries. He is
traditionally thought to be the father of three (the daughter Susanna and the
twins, Hamnet and Judith) whereas I prefer the idea of two (Susannah and the
illegitimate William Davenant) whereas many families had as many children as
they could, of which a high percentage died in childhood. And Paterson says,
The question ‘was Shakespeare ‘gay’ is so stupid as to
be barely worth answering but, for the record: of course he was.
The sonnets themselves
contain plenty more biographical clues, puzzles or false trails about the dark
lady, the rival poet, the possible glimpse of domestic disagreement in number
145 in the word play on ‘hate away’ for Hathaway and a very literal reading of
line 3 in sonnet 37 taken as evidence that Shakespeare was disabled. And we
might well ask what happened to the last two lines of 126.
So far, I’m not sure that
anybody at all has found supporting evidence for any of those in the
dedication. But, just when you thought that every possible avenue of enquiry
had been explored to the fullest extent, there’s more.
Last year, an American
academic, Geoffrey Caveney, presented a wholly new explanation. William Holme
was a professional associate of Thomas Thorpe and had died in 1607. In those days, publications were more the
property of publishers than authors, the monumental design of the dedication is
like that of an inscription on a tomb and the ‘adventurer setting forth’ could
be a friend going into the next life. This idea has not been dismissed by
establishment Shakespeare scholars like Stanley Wells, who are usually very
quick to dismiss new ideas that contradict their understanding of Shakespeare’s
life and, especially, his authorship of the plays and poems.
So, the possibilities become
more numerous, not less, and the Shakespeare scholarship industry looks like
expanding and continuing rather than arriving at any firm conclusions.
