SOURCE: Introduction to Shakespeare's Sonnets, edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones, Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd., 1997, pp. 1-106.

[In the following excerpt, Duncan-Jones reviews the publication history of Shakespeare's sonnets, focusing on several aspects of critical debate related to the 1609 publication.]

PUBLISHING HISTORY

THE AUTHENTICITY OF THE 1609 QUARTO

As published in 1609, Shakespeare's Sonnets was by no means so aberrant and mistimed as those who attempt to pigeon-hole the entire sequence as early work have often maintained. It is true that the great Elizabethan vogue for sonneteering, in the wake of Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, had spent its force by the end of the 1590s. But James's accession in 1603 stimulated a second wave. From the viewpoint of Jacobean readers, Q could be received as part of this small but vigorous movement to provide the new court culture with its own refashioned sonnet sequences and lyric collections. These were no longer idealistically Petrarchan or Sidneian, but characterized by sportiveness, satirical and epigrammatic touches, and abrupt reversals of mood. Drayton's 1605 redaction of Idea, in which he positively boasted of the ‘Wilde, madding, jocund, and irregular’ style of his verse, has already been mentioned. John Davies of Hereford's Wittes Pilgrimage, bearing the title-page motto Iucunda vicissitudo rerum (‘the joyful changefulness of things’), which may also belong to 1605,¹ expresses a conscious delight in variety and contradiction. It is one of the few sequences to match Shakespeare's in length, consisting of 152 sonnets, followed by a long section of commendatory and miscellaneous poems. Here, 104 playfully amorous sonnets are set in antithesis to a further 48 which are religious and soberly philosophical. The volume is dedicated to Philip Herbert, Earl of Montgomery, and to ‘his most honorable other halfe’, James Hay. Most of the other sonneteers of the early Jacobean period were Scottish. William Alexander's Aurora, for instance, was published by Shakespeare's Stratford schoolfellow Richard Field in 1604. Another Scottish gentleman, Alexander Craig, produced three lyric collections between 1603 and 1609, of which the middle one, his Amorose Songes, Sonets and Elegies (1606), is a highly unusual sonnet sequence. Craig distributes his sonnets between eight ladies, chief among them ‘Idea’ (presumably in emulation of Drayton), and includes also such contrasted love-objects as the ‘grave’ and stony-hearted Lithocardia and the excitingly promiscuous Lais. Like Drayton and Davies, Craig positively glories in the labyrinthine variety of ‘His wandring verse’². His previous volume, The Poeticall Essayes (1603), is even more remarkable for its variety of tone and subject-matter, celebrating both the Stuart royal family and his own lady, left behind in Banff. Craig takes Jacobean grotesqueness to unusual lengths, as when he drinks his absent lady's health in tobacco as well as wine:

                    for thy health once I carouse each day:
From pype of Loame and for thy saike I souke,
The flegm-attractive far-fett Indian smoake.

His self-contradictions and wild changes of mood are appropriate for that ‘wonderful year’, in which Scottish gentry newly arrived in London encountered both a splendid new court and a plague-infected City:

Here where the Pest approacheth us so narre,
To smoother breath before we be aware:
For at the gates of our most royall King,
Corrupted Carrions lie: O fearfull thing.(3)

A more immediate analogy to Shakespeare's Sonnets is provided by a sonnet in the same collection in which Craig expresses his double rage at being betrayed simultaneously by a male friend and a female mistress:

Deceitfull shee, and most unconstant hee:
Thus for each lyne I gave my selfe a lye,
That heretofore into their praise I pend.(4)

Though this collection is not technically a sonnet sequence, its self-consciously hectic energy, in which the poet seems frequently to feel betrayed by the suppleness of his own art, does offer some analogies to Shakespeare's, especially to such sonnets as 147—in which

My thoughts and my discourse as madmen's are,
At random from the truth vainly expressed

—or the closing 152, which concludes

… I have sworn thee fair: more perjured eye,
To swear against the truth so foul a lie.

The years 1603-9 also saw a proliferation of satirical and epigrammatic poetry, which the salty, ‘humorous’ character of most of the Jacobean sonnet sequences seems to match. Epigrammatists and satirists include John Owen, Henry Peacham, Richard West (published by Thorpe), and the prolific Samuel Rowlands.⁵ Two further Jacobean sonnet-sequences, however, represent a throwback to the more ‘golden’, and Petrarchan, style of the 1590s: David Murray's Caelia: containing certaine Sonets was appended to his Sophonisba, 1611, dedicated to Prince Henry; and William Drummond's dignified two-part sequence was included in his ?1614 Poems. Though it is with the more salty, self-contradictory sequences of 1603-6 that Shakespeare's Sonnets has most in common, these late examples testify to the persistence of the sonnet-sequence genre in the first decade of James's reign.

The traditional twentieth-century view has been that Q was published in some surreptitious or piratical manner. This notion is sometimes reinforced by a further assertion that it was ‘suppressed’ soon after publication,⁶ though there is no evidence for either claim. The origins of the widespread belief that Q is unauthorized lie, probably, in deep anxieties felt by British scholars who worked in the aftermath of the infamous ‘Labouchère amendment’ of 1885, which criminalized homosexual acts between consenting adult males, and the subsequent trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895. Wilde had repeatedly associated himself with Shakespeare's Sonnets, first by writing ‘The Portrait of Master W. H.’⁷ and then in his determined defence of his famous letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, beginning ‘My Own Boy’, which he described as being ‘like a little sonnet of Shakespeare’.⁸ As such, claimed Wilde, the letter was as far beyond the powers of ordinary human analysis as King Lear or Sonnets. Wilde's conviction and sentence to two years' imprisonment with hard labour must have made it a matter of some urgency for ambitious Shakespeare scholars, whose own social standing depended to a large extent on the character of the material they studied, utterly to expunge the association that Wilde had set up between Shakespeare's Sonnets and his own friendships with numerous young men. That England's—Europe's?—greatest poet should have both composed and published highly personal poems which explored a passionate relationship with a ‘lovely boy’, evidently, like Oscar Wilde's ‘Bosie’, a young aristocrat, must have appeared totally unacceptable.⁹ Shakespeare's works were increasingly taught in schools and universities: how could he possibly have nourished—and have publicly articulated—passions of the sort that led to Wilde's being condemned to two years' imprisonment with hard labour?

After his initial rashness in supporting first Pembroke, then Southampton, as candidates for Shakespeare's ‘fair friend’, Sidney Lee made a speedy about-turn, in 1897-8, altering his DNB article on Shakespeare for the benefit of American readers.¹⁰ To exonerate Shakespeare thoroughly, Lee adopted a belt-and-braces approach: the text was not made public by Shakespeare himself, but neither was it personally compromising. According to Lee, the text had been criminally appropriated by the unscrupulous and piratical Thomas Thorpe, for whom no language of abuse was too strong. But in any case, as he proceeded to demonstrate over the next few years, with special reference to an extensive investigation of French Renaissance poetry, the poems could be seen to lie comfortably within the boundaries of literary tradition—so the text was by no means so compromising as it might at first appear. By 1905 he was prepared to assert that ‘Hundreds of sonneteers had celebrated, in the language of love, the charms of young men.’¹¹ As Schoenbaum would have said, ‘They had not.’ But because of Lee's undoubted diligence and scholarship, such claims, though often wholly unsupported by evidence, seem to have been accepted without challenge. Also, according to Lee, most of the sonnets had been completed by 1594, so by the time Thorpe published them, and, ‘With characteristic insolence’, tacked on a love complaint by another writer, Shakespeare must have pretty much forgotten about them. Should any residue of a ‘personal’ interpretation survive Lee's account of the sonnets' ‘borrowed conceits’, at least the whole collection could be conveniently sidelined, biographically, as partaking of the folly of a great man's youth, rather than being regarded as the considered product of Shakespeare's maturity. Why it should be more acceptable to view Shakespeare as fascinated by a male love-object during the first decade of his married life than in his Jacobean maturity is not clear. But certainly in literary-historical terms there might appear to be some neatness in bracketing Sonnets with Venus and Adonis and Lucrece as three products of the early 1590s, after which Shakespeare could be viewed as devoting his writing energies entirely to the theatre. Many late-twentieth-century critics have clung tenaciously to this neat and tidy chronology.¹²

Contrary to what most previous editors have maintained, there is every reason to believe that the 1609 Quarto publication of Sonnets was authorized by Shakespeare himself. A powerful internal argument lies in his repeated deployment of the theme of immortalization through verse.¹³ Though this traditional motif has precedents in Horace and in the French Pléiade poets, it is hard to see how a writer so aware of practicalities as Shakespeare could claim to immortalize his friend in ‘black lines’ (63.13) unless he either allowed the sequence to achieve wide circulation in manuscript, which he clearly did not, or ensured that it was printed. Daniel and Drayton, the other two Elizabethan sonneteers who made prominent use of the theme of the immortalizing power of poetry, undoubtedly did use and control print publication of their sequences.¹⁴ In addition, three external witnesses testify to Shakespeare's own involvement. The first and most powerful, Thomas Heywood, has already been quoted. According to Heywood, Shakespeare eventually published his sonnets ‘in his owne name’—presumably a reference to the genitive title, SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS—in order to put right the wrong done to him by the piratical Jaggard in 1599. Since Shakespeare was still alive in 1612, and Heywood was a devoted admirer of Shakespeare's work, it seems unlikely that Heywood would make such a claim in print unless he was quite sure of his ground.

William Drummond, possibly also writing in Shakespeare's lifetime, circa 1614, just at the time when he published his own sonnets, made some notes on various English poets. Listing those who had written ‘on the Subject of Love’, he cited Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, Daniel, Drayton and Spenser. He noted that although Ralegh and Dyer had been praised by Puttenham, ‘their Works are so few that are come to my Hands, I cannot well say any thing of them. The last we have are Sir William Alexander and Shakspear, who have lately published their Works.’¹⁵ Sir William Alexander's youthful sonnet sequence Aurora, already mentioned, had been published in 1605, by Shakespeare's Stratford school-fellow Richard Field. Shakespeare's ‘Works’ on the topic of ‘Love’ must presumably denote the 1609 Q, and the plural form of reference may indicate that Drummond accepted A Lover's Complaint as an integral part of the collection. It is noteworthy also that Drummond's phrase ‘The last we have’ chronicles the reception of Shakespeare's Sonnets as a Jacobean text, not as a late appearance of a sequence originally written much earlier—but not much can be made of this.

The third witness is the most dubious. The entrepreneurial publisher John Benson, in his Epistle prefaced to Poems: Written by Wil. Shake-speare. Gent (1640), referred to: ‘some excellent and swetely composed Poems, of Master William Shakespeare, which in themselves appeare of the same purity, the Authour himselfe then living avouched’. While it may at first seem that Benson is claiming to know from personal experience that Shakespeare habitually ‘avouched’ the integrity and authenticity of Q, it is more probable that he simply alludes to Q's title-page, which describes the sonnets both as ‘SHAKE-SPEARES’, and as ‘Neuer before Imprinted’. Though Benson had in fact drawn on the 1612 Passionate Pilgrim, as well as altering and rearranging the authentic sonnets, his point may have been to advertise his own text as based on work publicly acknowledged by Shakespeare, in contrast to The Passionate Pilgrim.

The manner in which Q was entered in the Stationers' Register on 20 May 1609 by Thomas Thorpe as ‘a Booke called SHAKESPEARES sonnettes’ appears to have been perfectly regular and businesslike. It is quite consistent with Thorpe's practice in publishing other texts which we know to have been authorized. Among his other recent publications were Jonson's Sejanus his Fall (1605), Hymenaei (1696), Volpone (1607), Masques of Blackness and of Beautie (1608); Chapman, Jonson and Marston's Eastward Ho! (1605); Marston's What You Will (1607); and Chapman's Conspiracie and Tragedie of Byron (1608). These seem in each case to have been authorized texts, and in many cases to have been authorially corrected while at press.¹⁶ The majority were printed by George Eld, the printer of Q. Sidney Lee's oft-repeated assertion that Thorpe's line of business was as a ‘procurer of neglected “copy”’¹⁷ is completely unsupported by evidence. Indeed, it seems that during the period of his publication of Shakespeare's Sonnets Thorpe had built up a powerful reputation as a publisher of authorized texts by leading dramatists. But we may wonder why, if Shakespeare himself sold Sonnets, he did not turn once more to Richard Field, his Stratford school-fellow, who had published his narrative poems in 1593 and 1594, and, more recently, Alexander's sonnet sequence Aurora.

The answer may lie in Thorpe's theatrical associations. Though non-dramatic poetry did not figure much in Thorpe's ‘list’, his work for Shakespeare's fellow dramatists must inevitably have drawn him to his attention. After all, Shakespeare had been one of the ‘leading Tragedians’ in Jonson's Sejanus his Fall (Tiberius or Sejanus, perhaps?), and it has even been suggested that he had a hand in writing it.¹⁸ He could scarcely have failed to notice the up-market print publication of this play, which had been a flop in the theatre, and to observe also that it was published by Thorpe and printed by Eld, ‘who discharged his difficult taske with a high degree of accuracy’¹⁹. Having noticed that, Shakespeare surely also took note of Thorpe's 1607 publication of Volpone. It may reasonably be supposed that Thorpe gave a good price for literary texts by dramatists, for Jonson, to name but one, is most unlikely to have settled for anything else. For Shakespeare too, in a severe plague year, the price must have been an important consideration, even if he ended up feeling that he had ‘sold cheap what is most dear’ (110.3).

The division of copies between two booksellers, William Aspley and John Wright, indicates that Thorpe was determined to maximize his return on his adventurous ‘setting forth’ of Shakespeare's sonnets, and may suggest also that a larger than normal print-run had been produced.²⁰ William Aspley's shop was in St Paul's Churchyard, at the sign of ‘the Parrot’; John Wright's was a little to the north, at the door of Christ Church nearest to Newgate.²¹ Whether the moneyed classes returned to the City after the plague-ridden summer of 1609 by way of the Strand or of Holborn, they would pass near one of the shops at which Shakespeare's Sonnets was on sale. If title-pages were posted up as publicity, the large-size capitalized ‘SHAKESPEARES’ in the top line was bound to be attractive, at this period when his reputation was at its lifetime zenith.

Needless to say, given the widespread view of Q as a surreptitious publication, many scholars have also regarded the text itself as exceptionally badly printed, though the text has also had some enthusiastic champions.²² Lee, as ever, was the most outspoken of Q's critics, claiming not only that there was at least one ‘defect’ every ten lines, but also that ‘the compositors followed an unintelligent transcript’. For Lee, nothing at all about Q could be praised—he saw it as a slovenly version of a stolen manuscript itself of poor quality. However, through a painstaking analysis of supposed ‘misprints’ H. E. Rollins demonstrated that a high proportion of the word-forms so identified by Lee and others were no more than either variant spellings, perfectly acceptable in the period, or slight orthographical oddities. He reduced the list of eighty-four ‘misprints’ assembled by Lee and others to a mere thirty-six. The present edition, in which some previously emended words are retained, reduces the list yet further. Some of the oddities labelled ‘defects’ by Lee may reflect a dogged attempt by Eld's compositors—who were accustomed, after all, to working for the exceptionally pernickety Jonson—to be faithful to the peculiarities of their copy. For instance, the fourteen occurrences of ‘their’ for ‘thy’ seem to testify to the literalness with which they replicated what they thought they read in their copy, even when it made poor sense.

Admittedly, unlike those of Jonson's texts which had undergone careful proof-correction, Q could not be described as especially well printed, and A Lover's Complaint, especially, shows signs of haste and carelessness—unless, which is possible, that part of the manuscript copy was markedly worse written. But some of the features that give a bad impression visually have no bearing on textual accuracy. For instance, there seems to have been a severe shortage of good-quality titling type, needed for the initial letter of each sonnet, and this problem was exacerbated by Shakespeare's habit of opening sonnets with questions or exclamations. Twenty-three sonnets open with the letter W, which appears in four different founts: large ‘VV’ (three times), smaller ‘vv’ (eleven times), small ‘w’ (seven times) and italic ‘w’ (twice). Other large capitals that appear in varying sizes include H, S and O. Yet the compositors may have done their best to be faithful in printing from manuscript copy that was at times hard to read. Indeed, some of the peculiarities of spelling that Lee called ‘defects’ may reflect Shakespeare's own characteristic spelling patterns. Though MacD. P. Jackson has distinguished compositors ‘A’ and ‘B’, partly with reference to differences in the spelling of some frequently occurring words, such as ‘O’/‘Oh’, ‘ritch’/‘rich’, ‘dost’/‘doost’, some of the oddly spelt words that occur only once, such as ‘miter’ (metre, 17.12) or ‘sugiest’ (suggest, 144.2), may reflect the spelling of the copy. Compositorial habit is less likely to operate in the case of less common words. Also, one of the compositors may have been more faithful to the forms he found in his copy than the other was, his spelling practice being closer to the copy than that of his colleague.²³

Whether the copy manuscript itself was autograph, as Chambers and others have suggested, or a scribal transcript, perhaps with authorial corrections, Lee's account of it as ‘unintelligent’ is simply abusive. For instance, care is consistently given to the elision or inclusion of medial ‘e’ in relation to metre, and this is something that appears to have been characteristic also of Shakespeare's orthography.²⁴ There are very few instances of metrically necessary soundings or elisions which have not been marked visually. In order to make this clear, Q's elisions are recorded among the textual collations. Q's care for metrical correctness is consonant with careful reading of authorial copy.

Since we know next to nothing about Shakespeare's scribal habits, especially with reference to non-dramatic poetry, it is difficult to estimate the extent to which other features of Q may reflect them. For instance, thirty-three words are italicized. These may well have been italicized in the copy. Setting up in italic required compositors to turn to another case of type, and there seems no great reason why Eld's men should have gone to this extra trouble unless they believed that the change of fount was required of them by their copy. As George Wyndham pointed out in 1898,²⁵ many of the italicized words are either proper nouns, such as ‘Adonis’ (53.5), ‘Mars’ (55.7), ‘Eaues’ (93.13) or ‘Philomell’ (102.7), or words of Greek or Latin origin, such as ‘Autumne’ (104.5), ‘Abisme’ (112.9), or ‘Hereticke’ (124.9). But some of the italicized proper names cannot be adequately explained with reference to normal printing-house practice.²⁶ The most complex example is 135, with its seven italicized occurrences of ‘Will’, which are subtly and precisely distinguished from six unitalicized, and uncapitalized, occurrences of ‘will’. It is hard to envisage that anyone other than the poet could differentiate these thirteen instances of ‘Will’ / ‘will’ in such a careful manner. Also, it is hard to imagine why anyone except the poet should have gone to the trouble of italicizing various words that do not fall into the normal categories, such as ‘Rose’ (1.2), ‘Hews’ (20.7), ‘Informer’ (125.13) or ‘Alloes’ (LC 273). Lee's suggestion²⁷ that Shakespeare never learned to write italic script seems quite unconvincing, given his chosen profession, and the high standards of Stratford Grammar School.

The manuscript on which Q was based may indeed have been ‘formally distinctive, if not eccentric’, as Kerrigan suggests, but that is surely no argument for its being also ‘non-authorial’²⁸. Were a literary autograph certainly by Shakespeare ever to turn up, it could well prove to be ‘formally distinctive’. After all, Jonson was to praise Shakespeare's writing for its uniquely characteristic nature:

                    Look how the fathers face
          Liues in his issue, euen so, the race
Of Shakespeares minde, and manners brightly shines
          In his well torned, and true-filed lines
In each of which, he seemes to shake a Lance,
          As brandish't at the eyes of Ignorance.(29)

Though he was no doubt alluding chiefly to Shakespeare's literary style, Jonson may have been familiar also with his spear-shakingly recognizable penmanship. If the orthography of Q is eccentric, its eccentricity may be to some extent authorial. According to A. C. Partridge, ‘Shakespeare's spelling was old-fashioned in its attachment to full-spellings and its curious blend of Tudor, individual and pseudo-phonetic representations.’³⁰ He sees Shakespeare as learning better habits, after 1600, from Ben Jonson, but it is unlikely that his habits were wholly transformed. Indeed, in a later study Partridge has suggested that the ‘numerous idiosyncratic spellings’ in Q may be Shakespeare's own.³¹ The ‘book’ sold to Thorpe may have taken the form either of an autograph manuscript or of an authorially corrected scribal transcript.

BENSON AND BEYOND

The still popular practice of rearranging Shakespeare's Sonnets to produce the appearance of a different overall meaning or bearing began with the bookseller John Benson's edition in 1640.³² Though boldly entitled Poems: Written by Wil. Shake-speare. Gent, Benson's edition was even more outrageously piratical and misleading than Jaggard's 1612 Passionate Pilgrim, whose material it incorporated. About thirty of the poems it attributes to Shakespeare are by other writers.³³ The later parts of the volume are particularly confusing, with A Lover's Complaint surrounded by poems of Heywood's, and The Phoenix and the Turtle placed after the song (perhaps by Fletcher) ‘Take, O take those lips away’ and before Orlando's mawkish verses beginning ‘Why should this a desert be?’, from As You Like It (3.2.121ff.). These last, when forced into a context which makes them appear to be amorous verses of Shakespeare's own, seem particularly feeble. There is little doubt that Benson set out at once to ingratiate and to mislead his readers. There is a visible attempt, though not an entirely efficient one, to suggest that the addressee throughout is a woman. The ‘he’ pronoun is often, though not quite always, altered to ‘she’, and changes such as ‘sweet love’ for ‘sweet boy’ (108.5), or the entitling of 122 ‘Vpon the receit of a Table Book from his Mistris’, reinforce the suggestion that these are conventional, heterosexual love sonnets. But Benson's adaptation was unsystematic and incomplete. Though 126 (‘O thou my lovely Boy …’) is among eight sonnets omitted from his collection, the even more compromising 20 (‘A woman's face …’) is retained, with a title, ‘The Exchange’, which will surely not prevent attentive readers of the last six lines from noticing that the addressee must be anatomically male. In his prefatory epistle, Benson had the impudence to praise Shakespeare's sonnets for their lucidity:

in your perusall you shall finde them Seren, cleere and eligantly plaine, such gentle straines as shall recreate and not perplexe your braine, no intricate or cloudy stuffe to puzzell intellect, but perfect eloquence.

He must have been well aware that his own rearrangement and titling of the sonnets, his habitual running together of two or more sonnets to give the appearance of a longer poem, together with his mingling of Shakespearean with non-Shakespearean poems throughout the volume, was extremely misleading. His epistle may be taken as cogent evidence that the very difficult and original 1609 sonnets had indeed acquired a reputation, over the previous thirty years, for being ‘intricate or cloudy’. Though he makes no explicit allusion to the sex of Shakespeare's addressee, Benson's use of the word ‘Seren’ may have been intended to offer vague reassurance on this score to readers who had picked up a notion that Shakespeare's Sonnets was in some way abnormal, as well as puzzling.

For well over a century, Benson succeeded in muddying the textual waters. It was his edition that was read and edited, almost exclusively, until the superb work of Malone in 1780. Even the publisher Bernard Lintott (perhaps aided by the dramatist Congreve), though he presented a text based on Q, seems to have shared Benson's determination to heterosexualize the sequence, at least superficially. Sonnets 1-154 are described as ‘One Hundred and Fifty Sonnets, all of them in Praise of his Mistress’ (note the assertiveness of that ‘all’); and very oddly, A Lover's Complaint is called ‘A Lover's Complaint of his Angry Mistress’, thus identifying a male narrator, rather than a female complainer, as the ‘Lover’ of the title.³⁴ Neither of these descriptions, one would have thought, could long survive a close perusal of the poems themselves, which the editor transmits rather carefully. Possibly the unknown editor wanted to be faithful to Q, but Lintott felt that these titles should be added to reassure book-buyers that all the poems they were about to read were dedicated to the praise of Shakespeare's mistress, leaving them to discover the unlikelihood of this only when they got the volumes back home.

Though George Steevens included (without any comment or annotation) a version of Q in his 1766 edition of Twenty of the Plays of Shakespeare,³⁵ neither this nor the Lintott text seems to have excited much interest. Edward Capell prepared a further edition, based on ‘Lintott’, but it never reached print.³⁶ It was not until 1780 that the 1609 text was properly instated as the sole authoritative text of Shakespeare’s sonnets, when Edmond Malone brought out his two-volume Supplement to the 1778 Johnson-Steevens edition of the plays. Malone, apparently unruffled, observed that ‘one hundred and twenty [sic] of the following poems’ are addressed to a man, and claimed that parallels with the plays ‘leave not the smallest doubt of their authenticity’³⁷. But the harm had been done. Benson’s edition had successfully introduced doubts about whether or how often the speaker addressed a man, and implicitly suggested that, if rearranged, the sonnets might yield up a more conventional, accessible and socially acceptable message.

Even Malone, while observing wisely that ‘Daniel’s sonnets, which were published in 1592’, appear to be Shakespeare’s chief model, apparently failed to notice the structural parallel between Daniel’s Delia plus The Complaint of Rosamond, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets plus A Lover’s Complaint. He relegated A Lover’s Complaint to the very end of the volume, interposing The Passionate Pilgrim and The Phoenix and the Turtle before it. Though he did not explicity challenge the authenticity of A Lover’s Complaint, Malone’s low-key remark that ‘This poem was printed in 1609, with our author’s name, at the end of the quarto edition of his Sonnets’,³⁸ combined with his relegation of it to the very end of the volume, suggests that he had some doubts about it. Although a few later editors, such as Pooler, have included A Lover’s Complaint in editions of Sonnets despite such doubts—Pooler conceded no more than ‘it contains lines that might have been written by Shakespeare’³⁹—it is only with Kerrigan’s edition in 1986 that the Complaint has been confidently restored to its original position as an integral component of the sequence. Benson’s disintegration of Q did lasting damage.

CONTEXT AND ALLUSION

How do we reconcile Shakespeare’s consistently scornful allusions to sonnets and sonneteering in his plays with the fact of his having composed one of the longest sonnet sequences of the period? Sonnet-writing, in early comedies, is presented either as a trite and cynical aid to wooing—Proteus advises the lovesick Thurio

You must lay lime, to tangle her desires
By wailful sonnets, whose composed rhymes
Should be full-fraught with serviceable vows

(TGV 3.2.69-71)

—or as a sign of the mentally debilitating effect of love. Each of the four young men in Love’s Labour’s Lost in turn betrays his collapse into passion by the penning of a (bad) sonnet—or, in one case, lyric—prompted by the new experience. Their composition of a sonnet apiece is the clinching proof, in Much Ado, that Beatrice and Benedick have fallen in love (LLL 4.3; MA 5.4.86-90). In All’s Well Parolles uses a part-sonnet to warn Diana against Bertram, to which Bertram responds, ‘He shall be whipp’d through the army, which this rhyme in’s forehead (AW 4.3.203-25). Certainly sonnets and soldiery do not mix. When the Dauphin, in Henry V, proposes to compose a sonnet in praise of his horse, it is quite clear from his companions’ comments that this reveals his narcissism and weakness of character, and not merely because sonnet-writing is an inappropriate ploy for a commander on the eve of fighting a major battle (H5 3.7.42ff.). A taste for reading collections of sonnets, likewise, is associated by Shakespeare with feeble-mindedness, as when the hopelessly weedy Master Slender, in The Merry Wives of Windsor, declares ‘I had rather than forty shillings I had my book of songs and sonnets here’ (MW 1.1.179-80). Two of Shakespeare's most intelligent lovers, Orlando and Hamlet, deliver themselves when in love of puerile verses (though not in sonnet form) which suggest mental and aesthetic collapse. In the theatre, it seems, Shakespeare almost invariably presents the writing of love poetry in general, and sonnets in particular, as ridiculous.

The answer may lie in the radical difference between Shakespeare's Sonnets and all its Elizabethan and Continental predecessors. These poems have none of the tediously predictable quality of the love sonnets mocked in the plays. They are not merely non-Petrarchan and non-Sidneian, but in important respects both anti-Petrarchan and anti-Sidneian. Though Sidney ostensibly distinguished Astrophil's heartfelt utterances from ‘poor Petrarch's long deceased woes’⁴⁰, he did, nevertheless, write within the elastic boundaries of Petrarchanism, as redrawn by sixteenth-century French and Italian imitators. At a technical level, Sidney's sonnets are all written in the exacting ‘Italian’ form. The inclusion of songs within the sequence is also a broadly Petrarchan feature. But most conspicuously, the poems as a whole are, like Petrarch's, addressed to a single fictionalized and idealized female love-object, ‘Stella’, who proves, in the face of all of Astrophil's rhetorical endeavours, to be unattainable. Like Petrarch's Laura and Sidney's Stella, the addressees of Sidney's many English imitators, such as Lodge, Drayton, Daniel, Barnes and Fletcher, are also female.

Despite Sidney, Lee's bold claim, quoted above (p. 33), that ‘Hundreds of sonneteers had celebrated … the charms of young men’, there is actually only one other Elizabethan sonnet sequence with a young male addressee, Richard Barnfield's mini-sequence of twenty ‘Sonnets’ included in his Cynthia (1595).⁴¹ Indeed, there appears to be some as yet unexplained connection between Shakespeare and Barnfield. Two poems by Barnfield were included alongside Shakespeare's in The Passionate Pilgrim; Francis Meres, when he revealed to the world the existence of Shakespeare's ‘sugred Sonnets’, also gave particular praise to ‘my friend master Richard Barnefielde’; and most teasingly, Barnfield's Cynthia is prefaced by a floridly overwritten commendatory poem by one ‘T. T.’, whose tone of cryptic knowingness is somewhat analogous to that of Thomas Thorpe's dedication to Q. It ends:

So those rare Sonnets, where wits ripe doth lie,
With Troian Nimph, doe soare thy fame to skie,
          And those, and these, contend thy Muse to raise
          (Larke mounting Muse) with more then common praise.

Like Barnfield's twenty sonnets to ‘Ganymede’, but unlike every other Elizabethan sequence, Shakespeare's sonnets 1-126 celebrate a young male love-object; and so in a sense does A Lover's Complaint, much of which consists of a nameless maiden's anatomy of the irresistible charms and wiles of her young seducer. In making a young man's beauty and worth his central focus, Shakespeare may be seen as overturning the conventions of more than two hundred years of ‘Petrarchanism’, broadly interpreted.

Despite a widespread notion, promoted by such Victorian and Edwardian critics as Gerald Massey and Thomas Tyler, that the major question prompted by Shakespeare's Sonnets is the identity of the ‘dark lady’, only just over a sixth of the sonnets in the volume are unambiguously associated with a woman. Even those which are so associated can be seen as brutally defiant of Petrarchanism. Instead of exploring the subtle and complex effect on the speaker of an obsession with a chaste and highborn lady who can never be possessed physically, 127-52 offer backhanded praise of a manifestly non-aristocratic woman who is neither young, beautiful, intelligent nor chaste, but, like Touchstone's Audrey, provides a perfectly adequate outlet for male desire. In the famous 130 (‘My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun’) the poet issues an explicit challenge to all those other poets by whom mistresses have hitherto been ‘belied with false compare’. Though Shakespeare's celebration of ‘black’ beauty has often been linked with Sidney, whose ‘Stella’ has black eyes, it is really horribly different, for this woman also has a muddy complexion, bad breath and a clumsy walk. With utter cynicism, the speaker praises her as ‘a poor thing, but mine own’ (compare AYL 5.4.58), celebrating her in swaggering terms which are ingeniously offensive both to her and to women in general. While Sidney's Astrophil wished that ‘Pleasure might cause her read’ his sonnets,⁴² there could surely be no question of the woman described in Sonnets either reading or understanding what is said about her, let alone receiving any pleasure from it. Shakespeare's speaker seems, like Touchstone, to brag to other men in his audience that he can make satisfactory sexual use of a woman too stupid to realize that she is also being set up as the butt of his wit.

A strongly misogynistic bias is hinted at early on in the sequence. The youth may be celebrated in sonnet 18 as ‘more temperate’ in beauty than other poets' love-objects partly because, unlike them, he does not menstruate, so his beauty is not continually diminished by ‘nature's changing course’ (menstrual bleeding was known as ‘monthly courses’, OED 27). In 20 the youth is praised for possessing female beauty without female instability—‘An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling’—nor is he ‘acquainted / With shifting change, as is false women's fashion’ (see notes). He is anatomized as physiologically, as well as morally, superior to the female love-objects so over-praised by those poets who have been ‘Stirred by a painted beauty’ (21.2). A suspicion of some preoccupation with the negative connotations of menstruation is confirmed when the reader reaches the woman-focused 127-54 if it is observed that the total of these ‘dark lady’ sonnets is twenty-eight, corresponding with the lunar month or menstrual cycle.

In 1-126, which constitute what is in every sense the greater part of Shakespeare's Sonnets, Shakespeare seems rarely to refer to Petrarchanism, except by means of the implicit challenge or redefinition that he offers to it throughout in eulogizing a young male friend, rather than a distant, idealized woman, and in making almost no claims to spiritual enlightenment. An early annotator wrote at the end of his copy of Q ‘What a heap of wretched Infidel Stuff’⁴³. Although the exclusion of Petrarch's treatment of secular love as a route to religious transcendence characterizes many English responses to Petrarchanism, it is unusually marked in the case of Shakespeare. Indeed, in some sonnets he seems to push his idolatrous substitution of friend-worship for Christian worship to flamboyantly blasphemous extremes, as in the mock-Trinitarian rhetoric of 105, ‘Let not my love be called idolatry’, culminating in:

Three themes in one, which wondrous scope affords.
          Fair, kind and true have often lived alone,
          Which three, till now, never kept seat in one.

One answer, then, to the question of why Shakespeare composed a sonnet sequence might be literary. He sought to appropriate and redefine the genre, rejecting the stale conceits of mistress-worship, and to create a sonnet sequence so different from all its predecessors that the form could never be the same again. The title, ‘SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS’, can be read as suggesting this. Shakespeare presents the paramount sonnet sequence, which both continues and conclusively redefines that ‘excellence of sweet poesie’ which had been demonstrated nearly twenty years earlier in Sidney's Astrophil and Stella. The homoerotic thrust of 1-126, combined with the outrageous misogyny of 127-54, may also be construed as designed to gratify the literary culture of James's court, rather than (necessarily) to reflect or express any personal preference on the part of Shakespeare ‘the man’.

However, an alternative or additional approach to answering the question I have asked—why did Shakespeare write a sonnet sequence, since he seems to have despised traditional love poetry?—lies in recourse to biography, or biographical speculation. Romantic critics have liked to view Shakespeare as surprised into sonneteering by some real-life experience. Ever since the edition of Sonnets in 1837 by James Boaden, the first Pembrokian, scholars have pursued possible personal allusions. A popular view, especially among those who have not studied the whole sequence thoroughly, singles out the identity of the ‘dark lady’ as the chief question to be addressed. Frank Harris went to the length of suggesting that Shakespeare was stung into dramatic, as well as poetic, creativity by an unhappy affair with Mary Fitton, and owed her ‘the greater part of his renown’⁴⁴. This notion has been passionately endorsed by A. L. Rowse, who, on lighting on Emilia Lanier, exclaimed to his friends ‘This is she! This is the Lady!’ He gave one of the books in which he chronicled his ‘discovery’ the confident title Shakespeare's Sonnets: The Problems Solved (1973).

The search for ‘the Lady’ appears to have been driven by two motives. The first is a post-Romantic determination to conventionalize and familiarize Shakespeare's Sonnets, to attach the poems to that very courtly love tradition which, I have just suggested, Shakespeare was explicitly rejecting and debunking. Once identified, Shakespeare's femme fatale could supposedly join the ranks of other such ladies, from Petrarch's Laura to Keats's Fanny Brawne or W. B. Yeats's Maud Gonne, and as a consequence Shakespeare, as a love poet, could be comfortably assimilated into a great European tradition. Some Victorian and Edwardian scholars, such as Gerald Massey and Thomas Tyler, devoted large parts of their lonely lives to the quest for ‘the lady’, and Frank Harris and Bernard Shaw competed to dramatize the story of Shakespeare's ‘tragic love’. Working before the twentieth-century critical cult of ambiguity and word-play, these writers seem to have been oblivious to the sheer nastiness of many of the ‘dark lady’ sonnets, which can now be seen to encompass not so much passionate devotion to a distantly cruel mistress as elaborate mockery of a woman who is no more than a sexual convenience.

The second, and possibly most powerful, driving force behind the quest for ‘the Lady’ has been its power of suggestio falsi. The foregrounding of ‘the Lady’ strongly implies that the predominant thrust of Shakespeare's Sonnets is heterosexual. Devotees of an idealized, domesticated, image of Shakespeare the man may be a little uncomfortable at a suspicion of adultery, but this is nothing like so alarming as a suspicion of pederasty. The awkward fact that more than four-fifths of the sequence is devoted to celebrating a fair youth and to exploring the speaker's relationship with him can be bypassed if readers' attention is firmly enough directed towards ‘her’. In the case of Rowse, this motive has been delightfully transparent. While happy to categorize Marlowe as ‘a raving homo’, Rowse has been equally outspoken in his identification of ‘the Bard’ as a ‘red-blooded heterosexual’, instinctively thrilled by ‘the frou-frou of skirts’.⁴⁵ To his credit, he does take full account of 1-126, but offers splendidly idiosyncratic readings of these sonnets. Stupid people may have thought the notorious 20 a little compromising, for instance, but according to Rowse, ‘the boot is quite on the other leg … it was not Shakespeare who was homosexual, but the young peer who would not have minded. This is indisputable.’⁴⁶

Despite such attempts to foreground ‘the Lady’, ‘Mr. W. H.’ (Dedication 3) has of course also been the subject of much speculation, as has the ‘rival poet’ apparently alluded to in 78-86. Rollins offers a very full account of biographical interpretation up to 1944, and Schoenbaum continues the story brilliantly up to 1991 in his revised Shakespeare's Lives, concluding that ‘this author fearlessly predicts that, whether or not there will be an end of human foolery, we have not heard the last of W. H.’⁴⁷ Schoenbaum's remark was prompted in part by a more recent attempt to put a woman at the centre of Shakespeare's Sonnets, Barbara Everett's 1986 article on ‘Mrs. Shakespeare’. She suggested that Anne Hathaway, ‘a powerful, even attractively masculine woman’, identified herself as the master-mistress of the poet's passion, and that the valuable text was appropriated and sold to Thorpe by her presumed brother William Hathaway. In its bold creativity and defiance of documentary evidence this article merits comparison with Rowse at his most imaginative.

No doubt Schoenbaum's general proposition is correct, and the present edition is no more likely to put an end to biographical speculation than previous studies have done.⁴⁸ Nevertheless, the contextualization suggested here for Shakespeare's Sonnets, as a sequence in part written after 1600, and put into its final shape close in time to its authorized publication in 1609, carries with it some further implications for the identification of ‘Mr. W. H.’ The case for Southampton, one of the two strongest candidates, effectively collapses if this dating is accepted. Not only are Henry Wriothesley's initials the wrong way round; he was over 35 in 1609, and recollections of the time when he was a ‘lovely boy’ were rather distant. Also, as Chambers pointed out, if Southampton were the poet's ‘fair friend’, ‘one would expect to find some hints … of the major interests of Southampton's early life; his military ambitions, his comradeship with Essex, the romance of his marriage. There are none.’⁴⁹

Chambers also declared himself ‘rather struck by the fact that, although Southampton was still alive, it was not to him, but to Herbert and his brother that [the First Folio] was dedicated’. He felt that the case for William Herbert (1580-1630), Third Earl of Pembroke (see Fig. 3), had been ‘mishandled’ by previous scholars, such as Tyler, because of their preoccupation with Mary Fitton, the supposed ‘dark lady’. She continued to attract strong devotees despite evidence for her fair complexion; despite the fact that she was unmarried at the time of her affair with Herbert, not tied by a ‘bed-vow’, like the woman of sonnet 152; and despite the fact that, as a Maid of Honour, she was a well-guarded court lady not very likely to consort with a middle-aged actor. Even now there is some danger that Mary Fitton's candidature for the role of ‘dark lady’ may confuse the case for Herbert, so it requires to be disposed of. The monstrously sexist assumption that a woman who is sufficiently attracted to one man to consummate her love without marriage would have been prepared to have sex with anyone has coloured a surprising number even of later-twentieth-century interpretations of Shakespeare's Sonnets.⁵⁰ This assumption also crucially underpins Rowse's support for Emilia Lanier, which seems to depend on a belief that a woman who was Lord Hunsdon's mistress would be willing to have sex with anyone, including, therefore, Shakespeare. Yet in reality, the mistress of such an eminent nobleman as either young William Herbert or old Lord Hunsdon would be most unlikely (even if so inclined) to jeopardize her own position and the status of her future or actual child by promiscuity. If the ‘dark lady’ is still to be sought in literal terms, it should be borne in mind not only that Mary Fitton was light-complexioned and unmarried, but also that though a nobleman might readily visit taverns and stews, as do Shakespeare's Prince Hal in 1 and 2 Henry IV, and Lysimachus in Pericles, it would be virtually impossible for a common player, even a member of the King's Men, to penetrate the chambers of the Maids of Honour.

The chief bearing of Mary Fitton on the case for William Herbert as ‘W. H.’ lies in the fact that she was at least the fourth well-born girl whom Herbert resolutely refused to marry. In 1595 an attempt to betroth Herbert to Elizabeth Carey, daughter and sole heir of Sir George Carey, had to be abandoned because of the young man's ‘not liking’. (Her subsequent marriage to Sir Thomas Berkeley has often been identified, most recently by David Wiles,⁵¹ as the likely occasion for A Midsummer Night's Dream). Two years later, in the summer of 1597, a further attempt was made to match him suitably, this time to Bridget Vere, Lord Burghley's grand-daughter, and daughter of the Earl of Oxford. This, too, collapsed after some months of negotiation. Herbert's father was by now a sick man, and desperate to see his elder son suitably matched before he succeeded to the earldom. Yet another marriage, to a niece of Charles Howard, Earl of Nottingham, was attempted, and failed, in the summer of 1599. Robert Sidney's agent Rowland Whyte reported that ‘I do not find any disposition at all in this gallant young Lord to marry’⁵². It was not that Herbert was lacking in sexual passion: indeed, according to Clarendon's later testimony, ‘he was immoderately given up to women’. It was to marriage, specifically, that he was strongly averse. Early in 1600-1 he had made Mary Fitton pregnant, ‘but utterly renounceth all marriage’, despite a spell in the Fleet Prison followed by banishment from court. In the light of Herbert's well-documented reluctance to marry, Dover Wilson's speculations are attractive. He suggested that the Countess of Pembroke ‘asked [Shakespeare] to meet the young lord at Wilton, on his 17th birthday’, and commissioned him to compose an appropriate number of pro-marriage sonnets for the occasion.⁵³ This would locate sonnets 1-17 in April 1597, and suggest that Meres, in referring to Shakespeare's ‘private friends’, could be alluding to the Herbert family. Wilson's notion that young Herbert's tutor, Samuel Daniel, might have introduced Shakespeare to the family is also quite plausible. But in default of any supporting evidence, these can be no more than wild conjectures.

In any case, William Herbert's reluctance to marry, though certainly extremely apt to sonnets 1-17, constitutes only one of many arguments for his identity both with the dedicatee ‘Mr. W. H.’ and with the poet-speaker's ‘fair friend’. That Thorpe's dedicatee is the same man as the addressee of 1-126 has often been doubted. Yet most first-time readers will naturally conflate the two. In wishing the dedicatee ‘THAT. ETERNITY. / PROMISED. / BY. / OUR. EVER-LIVING. POET.’ Thorpe seems to add his own support to the poet's ‘ENSUING.’ claims to immortalize his friend in ‘black lines’ (63.13). Though some have strained to interpret ‘BEGETTER.’ as ‘procurer’, the word's most obvious connotation is ‘inspirer’. The poet's brain is the womb made fertile by his noble subject-matter, which brings forth sonnets as the subject's babies. An analogous application of this fairly common metaphor occurs in Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, 50, where Astrophil is in painful labour with ‘thoughts’ of Stella, to which he gives birth as lines of verse, ‘poor babes’, which he is tempted to kill for their inadequacy. Shakespeare's own Richard II, more solipsistically, attempted to identify his brain as a womb in which his own soul begets ‘A generation of still-breeding thoughts’ (R2 5.5.6-9).

But even more directly applicable to the dedication of Sonnets is Sidney's dedication of the Old Arcadia to the Countess of Pembroke. He calls the Arcadia ‘this child which I am loath to father’. His sister has inspired the work, by ‘desiring’ him to write it, so that his ‘young head’, womb-like, has had ‘many fancies begotten in it’⁵⁴. If Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke's son, born just at the time when the Old Arcadia, too, was coming to fruition,⁵⁵ was ‘Mr. W. H.’, he would have readily picked up the allusion to his uncle's celebrated dedication, lately published anew in the 1605 Arcadia—as well as many verbal and metaphoric echoes of Sidney within the sonnets themselves (see notes). For readers proceeding into the first seventeen or eighteen sonnets, focused on the addressee's failure to become a father, there emerges an elaborate paradox. W. H. is proclaimed by Thorpe as the sonnets' ‘ONLY. BEGETTER.’—but it seems that he has begotten only sonnets, not the living children who would immortalize him ‘a mightier way’, ‘With means more blessed than my barren rhyme’ (16.1-4). In what follows, therefore, I shall assume that ‘Mr. W. H.’ is the same individual as the original of the young man addressed and celebrated within the sonnets, and shall set out the case for his being based on William Herbert.

The financial aspect of patronage, in this period, should never be overlooked. After three years in which London's public theatres had been closed because of plague, Shakespeare must have been looking for the best reward possible for his precious sonnets. It is most improbable that he would have wished the book to be dedicated, sentimentally, to some obscure actor or sea-cook (the mythical ‘Willie Hughes’), or a penniless kinsman (his infant nephew William Hart, or his presumed brother-in-law William Hathaway)—least of all to ‘William Himself’ or ‘William [S]h[akespeare]’. None of these could offer him prestige and protection, or, most crucially, a substantial cash reward. His well-documented generosity to writers makes William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, a powerful candidate. Clarendon described him as so lavish in rewarding talented men that neither his own very large fortune nor that of his wife matched up to the exceptional liberality of his habits: rather than jockeying for favour or reward on his own behalf, he ‘was still ready to promote the pretences of worthy men’⁵⁶. And according to Aubrey,

He was the greatest Maecenas to learned Men of any Peer of his time: or since … He was a good Scholar, and delighted in Poetrie; and did sometimes (for his Diversion) write some Sonnets and Epigrammes.

As an exceptionally generous and intelligent patron of letters, and even something of a poet, Herbert was a worthy heir to his uncle Philip Sidney. Unlike Sidney, he had the resources, or at least the credit-rating, to support his lavishness. For instance, during the very year of Q, 1609, he gave a hundred pounds for the purchase of books to the newly founded Bodleian Library in Oxford.⁵⁷ He was already living and giving considerably beyond his means. Two letters to Sir Michael Hicks, one in May 1609, one in November, show him appealing for renewal of Hicks's loan to him of £1,800.⁵⁸ Hicks seems to have been quite happy to do this, for this was the year in which Pembroke's public career, initially slow to develop, really took off. On 27 May 1609 he was incorporated as a member of the King's Virginia Company of London.⁵⁹ By 1618 he was the largest individual investor in the company, with a stake of £400.⁶⁰ A response to news of this high-profile commitment, in the very week of Q's registration with the Stationers' Company, may be discerned in Thorpe's image of himself as ‘THE. WELL-WISHING. / ADVENTURER. IN. / SETTING. / FORTH.’ While Thorpe was an ‘adventurer in setting forth’ in the sense that he made an investment, and took a risk, in ‘setting forth’, or publishing, ‘THESE. ENSUING. SONNETS.’, Herbert was now committed to a much more exciting kind of ‘setting forth’—expeditions to explore and colonize the New World. While Thorpe was an ‘adventurer’, or investor, in books, Herbert was an ‘adventurer’ in ships, men and commodities. And while the name ‘Virginia’ alluded to the colony's origins in the previous reign, that of the Virgin Queen, the form of Herbert's own name, ‘Mr. W. H.’, alluded to the period before his father's death in January 1600/1, as the time when, not yet either an earl, or of age, or married, the youthful Herbert had ‘begotten’ the ensuing sonnets, in particular 1-17.

Much has been made of the supposed impropriety of an earl's being addressed as ‘Mr.’, though Chambers did not feel that ‘in such a document there would be anything very out of the way … in the suppression of an actual or courtesy title’.⁶¹ If ‘W. H.’ denotes William Herbert, one obvious function of the ‘Mr.’ would be to indicate that the sonnets dedicated to him had their origin, or ‘begetting’, in the period before his inheritance of the Earldom of Pembroke. Rather as William Alexander had stressed on the title-page the fact that his sonnet sequence Aurora (1604) contained ‘the first fancies of the Authors youth’, the ‘Mr.’ may have indicated the pre-1601 conception of Shakespeare's Sonnets. My conjecture is that when Shakespeare left London for Stratford in some haste at the end of May 1609 he left instructions with Thorpe to use this form of address to Herbert, and to set out the dedication in pointed capitals. Though the initials of ‘T. T.’ are at the bottom, and the over-rhetorical wording is evidently Thorpe's, the dedication, like the text itself, had Shakespeare's authority.

Both Shakespeare and Thorpe might reasonably have looked to Pembroke's generosity to make their venture worthwhile. If Nashe, as we now know, was given a reward of £5 for dedicating Christs Teares over Jerusalem (1593) to Lady Carey,⁶² it seems unlikely that Pembroke would have paid any less for the dedication of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Indeed, given Pembroke's well-attested munificence, he may have paid more. Something between £5 and £10 might be a reasonable guess. The effort expended by Shakespeare and Thorpe in gaining a reward of this magnitude should be compared with the rather different effort that Shakespeare was also investing, at just this time, in recovering the sum of £6, with 24s interest, from his debtor John Addenbrooke (see above, p. 12).

The dedication of the First Folio plays to Pembroke and his brother by Shakespeare's ‘fellows’ Heminge and Condell in 1623 alludes to the Herbert brothers as having ‘prosequuted both them, and their Author living, with so much fauour’. No doubt they too hoped for, and gained, good rewards from Pembroke and his brother. If they were aware that Sonnets had not only been authorized by Shakespeare himself—no ‘stolne, and surreptitious copy’, this—but that it had also been dedicated to Herbert, their momentous decision, whose long-term consequence has been the marginalization of all Shakespeare's non-dramatic work, to gather up plays only, would be fully explained. Pembroke did not need to have the sonnets presented to him if they were his already. Heminge and Condell's account of Shakespeare as ‘parent’ of the plays which are now ‘Orphanes’ may echo T. T.'s imagery of W. H. as ‘begetter’ of the sonnets.

The mock-lapidary form of the dedication, centred, and set out in capitals with a stop after each word, but in English …, may allude to two recent works by Ben Jonson. Both had been published by Thorpe. The 1607 ‘BEN: IONSON his / VOLPONE’ (note the genitive form of title, analogous to ‘SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS’) has on the title-page verso a centred, capitalized dedication to ‘THE TWO FAMOVS VNIVERSITIES’ by ‘BEN. IONSON / THE GRATEFVLL ACKNOWLEDGER’ (see Fig. 5)—a phrase mimicked in Thorpe's description of himself as ‘THE. WELL-WISHING. / ADVENTURER.’ For the Latinate device of placing a point after each capitalized word, but with an English text, the model was perhaps the consuls' proclamation in Act 5 of Sejanus his Fall, not centred, but capitalized and pointed. Since Jonson's learned tragedy Sejanus appears to have been written partly in response to Shakespeare's less learned Julius Caesar, Shakespeare may in turn have looked closely at it, echoing and appropriating some of its most portentously learned-seeming accoutrements. And Jonson, in turn, may have responded to the dedication of Shakespeare's Sonnets. As Dowden and others have observed, Jonson's 1616 dedication of his Epigrammes to the Earl of Pembroke opens rather oddly. After a centred and capitalized dedication ‘TO … WILLIAM / EARLE OF PEMBROKE, / L. CHAMBERLAYNE, &c.’, his epistle begins:

MY LORD. While you cannot change your merit, I dare not change your title: It was that made it, and not I. Vnder which name, I here offer to your Lo: the ripest of my studies, my Epigrammes; which though they carry danger in the sound, doe not therefore seeke your shelter: For, when I made them, I had nothing in my conscience, to expressing of which I did need a cypher.⁶³

Jonson's stress on his adoption of a correct and unalterable ‘title’—‘MY LORD’—under which to address Pembroke certainly sounds like a side-swipe at some other writer who has had the temerity to change it; and his assertion that the ensuing poems, though epigrams, a genre often regarded as dangerously personal or satirical, are in fact not so, may also allude to some other, more compromising or ‘dangerous’ form of poetry, which had indeed required the use of ‘a cypher’. If this passage does indeed refer to Shakespeare's Sonnets and its dedication, the phrase ‘nothing in my conscience’ also suggests that Jonson may have been one of the first of many readers to feel that Shakespeare's sonnets are morally compromising, and that the ‘public manners’ (111.4) that prompted him to publish his devotion to a young nobleman as a ‘lovely boy’ deserved rebuke. Shakespeare had committed a faux pas comparable with that of his own Falstaff when he addresses King Henry as ‘my sweet boy’ in front of the assembled court and echoes Daniel's Rosamond in appealing to him as ‘My King! My Jove!’ (2H4 5.5.42, 46).

If Shakespeare's patron and friend was Pembroke, Shakespeare was not alone in celebrating his beauty as well as his high birth and munificence. Francis Davison prefaced his courtly miscellany A Poetical Rhapsody, originally printed in 1602 but augmented and reprinted in 1608, with a sonnet praising Pembroke's ‘lovely’ ‘shape’ as well as his Sidneian ancestry. I quote the slightly revised 1608 text, since this immediately precedes the publication of Sonnets:

Great Earle, whose brave Heroicke minde is higher
And nobler, then thy noble high Degree:
Whose outward shape, though it most lovely be
Doth in faire Robes a fairer Soule attier:
Who rich in fading wealth, in endlesse Treasure
Of Vertue, Valour, Learning, richer art:
Whose present greatnes, men esteeme but part
Of what by line of future Hope they measure.
Thou worthy Sonne unto a peerelesse Mother,
Or Nephew to great Sidney of renowne,
Who has deserv'd thy Coronet, to crowne
With Lawrel crowne: a crown excelling th'other
I Consecrate these Rimes to thy great Name,
Which if thou like, they seeke no other fame.(64)

Henry Brown, the only scholar to have proposed Francis Davison as a candidate for the ‘rival poet’, has been dismissed with utter contempt and disbelief.⁶⁵ Yet in certain respects Davison seems a distinct possibility. A Poetical Rhapsody is partly composed of poems by himself, his brother Walter and a friend veiled under the label ‘Anomos’: these two fellow poets could possibly be alluded to as ‘his compeers by night’ (86.7). The subtext of the miscellany, both in 1602 and in 1608, was its passionate plea on behalf of Francis Davison's father, William, briefly Secretary of State to Queen Elizabeth, but cast into disgrace after his delivery of the warrant for the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. As the son of an eminent statesman, even a fallen one, Francis Davison enjoyed a far higher social status than Shakespeare, and in the latter's eyes may have appeared ‘a better spirit’ (80.2). William Davison, who had been a distinguished agent in Scotland and the Netherlands, was still alive in 1608,⁶⁶ and still banished from court: he could possibly have been alluded to as his eldest son's ‘affable familiar ghost’ who—a retired spy of Walsingham's—‘nightly gulls him with intelligence’ (86.9-10).

Yet it must be acknowledged that John Davies of Hereford, Samuel Daniel, George Chapman and Ben Jonson are all also plausible candidates for the role of ‘rival poet’. All were protégés of Pembroke, and any or all might have been viewed by Shakespeare as offering a threat or competition to him in the pursuit of Pembroke's favour. Davies, for instance, included a poem to Pembroke in Wittes Pilgrimage, in which he is addressed as ‘Faire featured Soule! well-shapen Spright!’⁶⁷ Also, as suggested above, some individual sonnets appear to reflect friendly competition between Shakespeare and Drayton, who seems not to have numbered Pembroke among his patrons. Perhaps, indeed, the ‘rival poet’ is a composite figure, and the mini-sequence 76-86 should be seen as exploring the theme of the speaker-poet's sense of being threatened by other poets through a fictionally amalgamated writer, drawing on several individuals, rather than as embodying any single thread of allusion.

Conclusive evidence for a particular friendship between Shakespeare and Pembroke is lacking. No reliance can be placed, unfortunately, on W. J. Cory's account of a letter from the Countess of Pembroke (his mother) containing the sentence ‘We have the man Shakespeare with us’.⁶⁸ Yet the circumstantial evidence is plentiful. There is no doubt that Pembroke favoured plays and players; he is documented as giving frequent and generous help to Ben Jonson, whose career was in so many ways parallel to Shakespeare's; he was rising high, and a conspicuous target for those seeking patronage, in 1609; his personal initials were W. H.; Thomas Thorpe openly dedicated a further work to him in 1610, applying to him the unusually intimate epithets ‘gracefull’ and ‘sweete’;⁶⁹ and he was to be the prime dedicatee of the First Folio.

Two further documents, while not clinching the case, suggest strongly that some degree of unconventional intimacy between Pembroke and a celebrated playwright and actor is at least within the bounds of possibility. On 6 August 1604 Giovanni Scaramelli, Venetian Secretary in England, sent the Doge and Senate a detailed eyewitness account of James I's coronation. He describes the coronation procession; the King's arrival at the Abbey, under a canopy supported by four rods with silver bells hanging from them; the disrobing and anointing; the coronation itself; and then the oaths of allegiance made by the peers. Each earl in turn advanced, knelt before the King, and kissed his hand, and in some cases also the crown. Then, in an account which singles out very few individuals by name, Scaramelli comes out with a startling anecdote:

The Earl of Pembroke, a handsome youth, who is always with the King, and always joking with him, actually kissed his Majesty's face, whereupon the King laughed and gave him a little cuff.⁷⁰

Scaramelli's word, schiaffetto, is a diminutive of schiaffo, defined by John Florio as ‘a cuffe, a buffet, a box, a whirret or clap with a hand on the cheeke’.⁷¹ Pembroke's extraordinary boldness in making such a public display of his personal intimacy with the King suggests a remarkable degree of social and physical self-confidence. Like the youth of sonnet 20, whose epicene beauty ‘steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth’, Pembroke seems to have combined a career as a determined womanizer with an enthusiastic participation in the homosocial familiarities of James and his minions. This may have enabled him also to move easily and affably among the King's players.

A further document testifies to the depth of his affection for one of these in particular, Richard Burbage, who surely qualifies for the status of ‘best friend’ to Shakespeare. On 20 May 1619 Pembroke wrote a letter to Viscount Doncaster, then ambassador to Germany, who had ‘Mr. Doctor Dunn’ among his companions. The occasion for the letter's being written at all lay in the recent death of Burbage. The Duke of Lennox was entertaining the departing French ambassador to ‘a great supper’,

& even now all the company are at the play, which I being tender harted could not endure to see so soone after the loss of my old acquaintance Burbadg.⁷²

Burbage had died on 9 March, so Pembroke's grief was sustained for well over two months. He may indeed have felt more devastated by Burbage's death than by that of Queen Anne, which had occurred a few days earlier. Like the coronation incident, this autograph letter reveals Pembroke as a man quite ready to step out of line at grand court occasions for the sake of particular affections and allegiances. Just as his full-frontal kiss of James sounds to have been a public display of a particularly close relationship, so Pembroke's absence from the play in the Great Chamber at Whitehall appears to have been a deliberate signal of his special personal affection for the leading actor of the age. It was a public display of a private loss: otherwise why would he tell Doncaster about it? No doubt he also made it clear to his court companions that grief was the reason for his refusal to watch the play, thus underlining the fact that he knew Burbage better than they did. Rather strikingly, the play performed that night was Pericles.⁷³ Pembroke's ‘tender harted’ recollection of the dead Burbage may also have encompassed sad memories of this play's chief author, Shakespeare, dead three years earlier.

For the purposes of Shakespeare's Sonnets, however, the important point here is that Pembroke was prepared to receive and express affection in an individual and somewhat unconventional way. It is by no means unthinkable that he had been on terms of some intimacy with Burbage's colleague Shakespeare. Though Jonson may have liked to think that Shakespeare and Thorpe's address to him as ‘Mr.’ was a solecism, this could in truth have reflected their awareness that Pembroke was a man who positively enjoyed breaching protocol in the cause of friendship.

Finally, it appears that Pembroke perused and responded to Shakespeare's Sonnets. One of his own poems, the lyric initiating his debate about love with Benjamin Rudyerd, opens with a verbal and thematic elaboration of Shakespeare's sonnet 116, ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds’, and incorporates the phrase ‘love is not love’:

If her disdaine least change in yow can move
                                        yow doe not love
for while your hope, giue fuell to your fyer,
                                        yow feel desire
Love is not love, but given free,
And soe is mine, soe should yours bee.

Once it is accepted that the publication of Q was authorized by Shakespeare, and that it was in the Jacobean period that he put the sequence into its final form, an identification of Pembroke as the dedicatee and addressee of Sonnets becomes overwhelmingly attractive. If some of the ‘fair youth’ sonnets, or versions of them, were written as early as 1592-5, these may indeed have been originally associated with Southampton, dedicatee of the narrative poems in 1593 and 1594. But as completed and published in 1609 the sequence strongly invites a reference to Pembroke. …

Notes

1. John Davies of Herford, Wittes Pilgrimage, through a world of amorous sonnets (no date, but entered in the Stationers' Register on 27 September 1605). The sonnet sequence is followed by an extensive collection of miscellaneous lyrics, many of them associated with the Herbert family.

2. Alexander Craig, The Amorose Songes, Sonets and Elegies (1606), sig. 18^v.

3. Alexander Craig, Poeticall Essayes (1603), sig. F1^r.

4. Ibid., sig. E2^v.

5. John Owen, Epigrammatum libri tres (1606); Henry Peacham, The More the Merrier, containing three-score and odde head-lesse epigrams (1608); Richard West, Wits a.b.c., or A Century of Epigrams (1608); Samuel Rowlands, Looke To It: for Ile Stabbe Ye (1604), Hell's Broke Loose (1605), Humors Looking Glasse (1608). Cf. also William Percy's ‘one singuler Booke of Epigrammes’, dated 1610, in Huntington MS HM4, fols 195-217.

6. Cf. J. Dover Wilson, Cam², xlii.

7. First published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (July 1889).

8. H. Montgomery Hyde, The Trials of Oscar Wilde (NY 1962) 245 (Third Trial); cf. also First Trial, 115.

9. Sidney Lee's friend and Balliol contemporary H. C. Beeching, whose career was as a churchman, continued to maintain that the sonnets were personal documents; cf. H. C. Beeching, ed., The Sonnets of Shakespeare (1904), viiff., in which he explicitly rebuts Lee's purely literary reading, asking, for instance, ‘Did any Elizabethan client … speak of his love for his patron as keeping him awake at night?’ It may be significant that Beeching's DNB biography includes no mention of this edition.

10. Schoenbaum, Lives, 370-1.

11. Sidney Lee, ed., Shakespeare's Sonnets (1905), 10.

12. This scenario is vigorously explored by Schmidgall; cf. also Bloom, 3, where Bloom states that Sonnets belongs to ‘1592 to 1596 or so’.

13. As in 18, 19, 32, 55, 60, 63, 65, 100 and 101.

14. For a contextualization of the theme of poetic immortality, see Leishman, 69-91.

15. William Drummond of Hawthornden, Works (1711), 226.

16. For a full list of Thorpe's publications, see Katharine F. Pantzer, STC, 3.168; for a detailed account of his publishing career, see Duncan-Jones, ‘Sonnets unauthorized?’.

17. Lee, 94.

18. Barton, 94.

19. Jonson, 4.330.

20. The suggestion recorded by Kerrigan (427) ‘that Thorpe diverted copies to avoid the suppression of his volume by Shakespeare’ is absurd. Aspley had worked for Thorpe on many other publications; John Wright may have been chosen as the secondary bookseller precisely because his shop was in a conspicuous position.

21. STC, 3.6, 190.

22. Rollins 2.6-11.

23. For strong evidence that Eld's printers at this period were normally faithful to the accidentals they found in their copy, see Murray.

24. Partridge, Orthography, 70.

25. Rollins, 2.7.

26. Cf. McKerrow, 251.

27. Lee, 294.

28. Kerrigan, 431.

29. Jonson, 8.392

30. Partridge, Orthography, 79.

31. Partridge, Grammar, 111.

32. Poems: Written by Wil. Shake-speare. Gent …, to be sold by John Benson, dwelling in St. Dunstans Church-yard (1640).

33. The figure is imprecise because of the Shakespearean dubia included in The Passionate Pilgrim.

34. A Collection of Poems, in Two Volumes: Being all the Miscellanies of Mr. William Shakespeare, which were Publish'd by himself in the year 1609, and now correctly printed from those Editions, Printed for Bernard Lintott (?1711).

35. George Steevens, ed., Twenty of the Plays of Shakespeare (1766), iv.

36. The copy of Lintott’s edition marked up by Capell is in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge.

37. Malone, 1.579-81.

38. Ibid., 1.732.

39. Ard¹, x1.

40. AS, 15.7.

41. Richard Barnfield, Cynthia. With Certaine Sonnets, and the Legend of Cassandra (1595).

42. AS, 1.3.

43. The copy in the Rosenbach Collection; cf. Rollins, 2.348.

44. Harris, 231.

45. Personal conversation with K. D.-J. at All Souls, c. 1984.

46. Rowse, xxv.

47. Schoenbaum, Lives, 566.

48. For another attempt to put an end to further speculation, see Foster, who claims that ‘W. H.’ is a misprint for ‘W. SH.’

49. Chambers, Shakespeare, 1.565-7.

50. For an extended challenge to another instance of the persistence of this view, see Lindley.

51. Wiles, passim.

52. HMC De L'Isle and Dudley, 2.478; Brennan, 101.

53. Cam², c.

54. OA, 3.

55. See Duncan-Jones, Sidney, 168ff.

56. Quoted in Cam², cxxi.

57. Bodleian Benefactors' Register.

58. BL MS Lansdowne 91, fols 45, 143.

59. CSP Dom. 1603-10, 515.

60. Brennan, 149.

61. Chambers, Shakespeare, 1.566.

62. Duncan-Jones, ‘Nashe’.

63. Jonson, 8.25.

64. Francis Davison, A Poetical Rapsodie (1608), sig. A2^r. Cf. also John Davies of Hereford, Wittes Pilgrimage (?1605), sig. Q2^r-v.

65. Rollins, 1.284.

66. He died in his house in Stepney about 21 December 1608.

67. John Davies of Hereford, Wittes Pilgrimage, sig. Q2^r-v.

68. Brennan 224.

69. J. H., trans., St. Augustine of the City of God (entered in the Stationers' Register in 1608), printed by George Eld (1610), sig. A3; cf. also the second edition of John Healey's Epictetus his Manuell (1616), floridly dedicated to Pembroke by Thorpe.

70. CSP Venetian 1603-7, 77. The original reads: ‘Et fra questi il Conte di Pemruch, giovane gratioso et che sta sempre col Rè e su i scherzi, basciò anco la faccia a Sua Maesta, che si pose a rider a gli diede un schiaffetto.’

71. John Florio, Queen Anna's New World of Words (1611).

72. BL MS Egerton 2592, fols. 81-2.

73. Bentley, 7.31.

Abbreviations and References

Unless otherwise specified, the edition of Shakespeare used for references and quotations from works other than Sonnets is Arden 2. The Bible used for scriptural references and quotations is A. W. Pollard's edition (Oxford, 1911) of the Authorized Version. All quotations and translations from classical authors are taken from the Loeb Classical Library, unless another source is indicated. In all references, the place of publication is London unless otherwise stated.

Abbreviations

Abbreviations Used in the Notes

* precedes commentary notes involving readings altered from the early edition on which this edition is based

this edn: a reading adopted for the first time in this edition

Works by and Partly by Shakespeare

AC: Antony and Cleopatra

AW: All's Well That Ends Well

AYL: As You Like It

CE: The Comedy of Errors

Cor: Coriolanus

Cym: Cymbeline

Ham: Hamlet

1H4: Henry IV, Part 1

2H4: Henry IV, Part 2

H5: Henry V

1H6: Henry VI, Part 1

2H6: Henry VI, Part 2

3H6: Henry VI, Part 3

H8: Henry VIII

JC: Julius Caesar

KJ: King John

KL: King Lear

LC: A Lover's Complaint

LLL: Love's Labour's Lost

Luc: The Rape of Lucrece

MA: Much Ado About Nothing

Mac: Macbeth

MM: Measure for Measure

MND: A Midsummer Night's Dream

MV: The Merchant of Venice

MW: The Merry Wives of Windsor

Oth: Othello

Per: Pericles

PP: The Passionate Pilgrim

PT: The Phoenix and the Turtle

R2: Richard II

R3: Richard III

RJ: Romeo and Juliet

Son: Shakespeare's Sonnets

TC: Troilus and Cressida

Tem: The Tempest

TGV: The Two Gentlemen of Verona

Tim: Timon of Athens

Tit: Titus Andronicus

TN: Twelfth Night

TNK: The Two Noble Kinsmen

TS: The Taming of the Shrew

VA: Venus and Adonis

WT: The Winter's Tale

References

Editions of Shakespeare Collated

Ard¹: C. Knox Pooler, ed., The Works of Shakespeare: Sonnets, The Arden Shakespeare (1918)

Benson: Poems: Written by Wil. Shake-speare. Gent, published by John Benson (1640)

Booth: Stephen Booth, ed., Shakespeare's Sonnets (New Haven, Conn., and London 1977)

Cam²: J. Dover Wilson, ed., Sonnets (Cambridge, 1966)

Cam³: G. Blakemore Evans, ed., The Sonnets (Cambridge, 1996)

Capell: Edward Capell, marked-up copy of Sonnets published by Bernard Lintott (1711), in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge

IR: W. G. Ingram and Theodore Redpath, eds, Shakespeare's Sonnets (1964, 1978)

Kerrigan: John Kerrigan, ed., The Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint, The New Penguin Shakespeare (Harmondsworth, 1986)

Malone: Edmond Malone, Supplement to the Edition of Shakespeare's Plays published in 1778 (1780)

Oxf: Stanley Wells & Gary Taylor, eds, Complete Works (1986)

PP: The Passionate Pilgrime. By W. Shakespeare. (1599), Huntington Library Copy, reproduced in J. M. Osborn, Louis L. Martz & Eugene M. Waith, eds, Shakespeare's Poems: A Facsimile of the Earliest Editions (New Haven and London, 1964)

Q: Shake-speare's Sonnets. Neuer before Imprinted, published by Thomas Thorpe (1609); facsimile ed. J. M. Osborn (New Haven, Conn., 1964), and also included in Booth

Riv: Works, gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans, Riverside Shakespeare (Boston, Mass., 1974)

Other Works Cited

The list comprises edited texts and works of scholarship later than 1850. Unedited manuscripts and early printed books are not itemized here, and are referred to by their original, old-spelling titles.

Abbott: E. A. Abbott, A Shakespearian Grammar, 2nd edn (1870)

Armada: Richard Ormond et al., Armada (1988)

Baldwin: T. W. Baldwin, On the Literary Genetics of Shakespeare's Poems and Sonnets (Urbana, Ill., 1950)

Barroll: J. Leeds Barroll, Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare's Theatre (Ithaca and London, 1991)

Barton: Anne Barton, Ben Jonson, Dramatist (1984)

BCP: John E. Booty, ed., The Book of Common Prayer 1559: The Elizabethan Prayer Book (Charlottesville, Va., 1976)

Beal: Peter Beal, Index of Literary Manuscripts 1450-1625, 2 vols (New York, 1980)

Bearman: Robert Bearman, Shakespeare in the Stratford Records (1994)

Bentley: G. E. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 vols (1968)

BL MS: British Library Manuscript

Bloom: Harold Bloom, ed., Critical Interpretations: Shakespeare's Sonnets (New York, 1987)

Bradbrook: M. C. Bradbrook, The School of Night (1936)

Brennan: Michael Brennan, Literary Patronage in the English Renaissance (1988)

Brown & Feavor: Ivor Brown & G. Feavor, Amazing Monument (1939)

Burrow: J. A. W. Burrow, The Ages of Man (1986)

Cameron: Alan Cameron, The Greek Anthology from Meleager to Planudes (1993)

Castiglione: Baldassare Castiglione, The Booke of the Courtier, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby (1561), The Tudor Translations, 23 (1900)

Chambers, Shakespeare: E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols (Oxford, 1930)

Chambers, Stage: E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols (1923)

Chaucer: The Riverside Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson, rev. L. D. Benson (1987)

Chedgzoy: Kate Chedgzoy, Shakespeare's Queer Children: Sexual Politics and Contemporary Culture (Manchester and New York, 1995)

Cheney: C. R. Cheney, Handbook of Dates for Students of English History (1970)

Coleridge: T. M. Raysor, ed., Coleridge's Shakespearean Criticism (1930)

Colie: Rosalie Colie, Shakespeare's Living Art (1974)

Colie, Resources: Rosalie Colie, The Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the Renaissance (Los Angeles and London, 1973)

CSP: Calendars of State Papers

Davies: Robert Krueger, ed., Poems of Sir John Davies (1975)

DNB: Sir Leslie Stephen & Sir Sidney Lee, eds, Dictionary of National Biography (1885-1901)

Dobson: Eric Dobson, English Promunciation 1500-1700, 2 vols (1968)

Donne: A. J. Smith, ed., The Complete English Poems of John Donne (1971)

Drayton: J. W. Hebel, Kathleen Tillotson, Bernard Newdigate et al., eds, The Works of Michael Drayton, 6 vols (1961)

Dubrow: Heather Dubrow, Captive Victors: Shakespeare's Narrative Poems and Sonnets (1987)

Duncan-Jones, ‘Canker blooms’: Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘Deep-dyed canker blooms: botanical reference in Sonnet 54’, RES, n.s. 46:184 (1995), 521-5

Duncan-Jones, ‘Modernizing’: Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘Filling the unforgiving minute: modernizing SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS (1609)’, EC, 45:3 (1995), 199-207

Duncan-Jones, ‘Nashe’: Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘Nashe in Newgate’, TLS, 22 March 1996, 15

Duncan-Jones, ‘Red and white’: Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘Much ado with red and white: the earliest readers of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis (1593)’, RES, n.s. 44:176 (1993), 479-501

Duncan-Jones, Sidney: Katherine Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet (1991)

Duncan-Jones, ‘Sonnets called?’: Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘What are Shakespeare's sonnets called?’, EC, 47.1 (1997), 1-12

Duncan-Jones, ‘Sonnets unauthorized?’: Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘Was the 1609 Shake-speares Sonnets really unauthorized?’, RES, 34 (1983), 151-71

Duncan-Jones, ‘Syren teares’: Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘“Syren teares”: infection or enchantment in Shakespeare's Sonnet 119’, RES, ns. 48.189 (1997), 56-60

EC: Essays in Criticism

Edward III: C. F. Tucker Brooke, ed., in The Shakespeare Apocrypha, 1908

E. E. D.-J: Mrs. E. E. Duncan-Jones, private communication

ELR: English Literary Renaissance

Empson: William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1935; rev. edn, 1953)

Evans, ‘Lawes’: Willa McClung Evans, ‘Lawes’ version of Shakespeare's Sonnet CXVI’, PMLA, 51 (1936), 120-2

Everett, ‘Greening’: Barbara Everett, ‘Shakespeare's greening’, TLS, 8 July 1994, 11-13

Everett, ‘Mrs. Shakespeare’: Barbara Everett, ‘Mrs. Shakespeare’, LRB, 8 (19 December 1986), 7-10

Farmer: Norman K. Farmer, ‘Holograph revisions in two poems by Fulke Greville’, ELR, 4 (1974), 98-110

Ferry: Anne Ferry, All in War with Time: Love Poetry of Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Marvell (1975)

Fettiplace: Hilary Spurling, ed., Elinor Fettiplace's Receipt Book (1986)

Foster: Donald Foster, ‘Master W. H., R.I.P.’, PMLA, 102 (1987), 42-54

Fowler: Alastair Fowler, Triumphal Forms (1970)

Fracastoro: Geoffrey Eastough, ed., Fracastoro's ‘Syphilis’ (Liverpool, 1984)

Fraunce: Abraham Fraunce, The Arcadian Rhetorike (1588), ed. Ethel Seaton (1950)

Garber: Marjorie Garber, Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life (1995)

Gascoigne: J. W. Cunliffe, ed., The Works of George Gascoigne, 2 vols (1907)

Glossary: C. T. Onions, A Shakespeare Glossary, rev. Robert D. Eagleson (Oxford, 1986)

Graziani: René Graziani, ‘The numbering of Shakespeare's Sonnets 12, 60 and 126’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 35 (1984), 79-82

Gurr: Andrew Gurr, ‘Shakespeare's first poem: Sonnet 145’, EC, 21 (1971), 221-6

Hanks & Hodges: P. Hanks & F. Hodges, A Dictionary of Surnames (1988)

Harington: N. E. McClure, ed., The Letters and Epigrams of Sir John Harington (1930)

Harris: Frank Harris, The Man Shakespeare and his Tragic Story (1909)

Henslowe Papers: R. A. Foakes, ed., The Henslowe Papers, 2 vols (1977)

Herbert: F. E. Hutchinson, ed., The Works of George Herbert (1941)

Heywood: Thomas Heywood, Oenone and Paris (1594), ed. J. Q. Adams (1943)

Hieatt, ‘LC, Cym and Son’: A. K. Hieatt, T. G. Bishop & E. A. Nicholson, ‘“Lover's Complaint”, Cymbeline and Sonnets’, N&Q, 232 (1987), 219-24

Hieatt, ‘When?’: A. K. Hieatt, Charles W. Hieatt & Anne Lake Prescott, ‘When did Shakespeare write Sonnets 1609?’, SP, 88:1 (Winter 1991), 69-109

HMC: Historical Manuscripts Commission, Reports on Manuscripts

Hobbs: Mary Hobbs, ‘Shakespeare's Sonnet II: a “sugred sonnet”?’, N&Q, 224 (1979), 112-13

Honigmann: E. A. J. Honigmann, ‘There is a world elsewhere: William Shakespeare, businessman’, in W. Habicht, D. J. Palmer & R. Pringle, eds, Images of Shakespeare (1988), 40-6

Hopper: Vincent F. Hopper, Medieval Number Symbolism: Its Sources, Meaning and Influence (New York, 1935; repr. 1969)

Hotson: Leslie Hotson, ‘Shakespeare's Sonnets Dated’ and Other Essays (1949)

Hutton: James Hutton, ‘Analogues of Shakespeare's Sonnets 153-4: contributions to the history of a theme’, Modern Philology, 38 (1940-1), 385-403

Hyde, Other Love: H. Montgomery Hyde, The Other Love: An Historical and Contemporary Survey of Homosexuality in Britain (1975)

Hyde, Trials: H. Montgomery Hyde, The Trials of Oscar Wilde (New York, 1962)

Jackson, ‘Complaint’: Mac D. P. Jackson, ‘Shakespeare's A Lover's Complaint: its date and authenticity’, University of Auckland Bulletin, 72, English Series, 13 (Auckland, 1965)

Jackson, ‘Compositors’: Mac D. P. Jackson, ‘Punctuation and the compositors of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1609)’, The Library, 5th series, 30 (1975), 9-10

Jones: Emrys Jones, ed., The New Oxford Book of Sixteenth Century Verse (Oxford, 1991)

Jonson: C. H. Herford & Percy Simpson, eds, Ben Jonson, 11 vols (Oxford, 1925-52)

Kerrigan, Motives: John Kerrigan, ed., Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and ‘Female Complaint’: A Critical Anthology (1991)

Knight: G. Wilson Knight, The Mutual Flame: On Shakespeare's Sonnets and ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’ (1955)

Lacey: Robert Lacey, Robert Earl of Essex: An Elizabethan Icarus (1971)

Lee: Sidney Lee, A Life of William Shakespeare (1904)

Leishman: J. B. Leishman, Themes and Variations in Shakespeare's Sonnets (1961)

Lennard: John Lennard, ‘But I Digress’: The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed Verse (1991)

Lindley: David Lindley, The Trials of Frances Howard: Fact and Fiction at the Court of King James (1993)

Linthicum: M. Channing Linthicum, Costume in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (1936)

LRB: The London Review of Books

McKerrow: R. B. McKerrow, Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students (1927)

McPherson: David McPherson, ‘Ben Jonson's library and marginalia’, SP, 71 (1974), 46-7

Mahood: Molly Mahood, Shakespeare's Wordplay (1957)

Marlowe, Dr Faustus: Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, ed. J. D. Jump (1962)

Marlowe, Poems: Millar MacLure, ed., Christopher Marlowe: The Poems (1988)

Marotti: Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance (Ithaca and London, 1995)

Martin: Peter Martin, Edmond Malone, Shakespearean Scholar (1995)

Marvell: H. M. Margoliouth, P. Legouis & E. E. Duncan-Jones, eds, The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell (1971)

Maxwel: J. C. Maxwell, ‘“Rebel Powers”: Shakespeare and Daniel’, N&Q, 212 (1967), 139

Milton, Poems: John Carey and Alastair Fowler, eds, The Poems of John Milton (New York and London, 1968)

Milton, Prose Works: Douglas Bush et al., eds, Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols (New Haven and London, 1953-82)

Morgan: Paul Morgan, ‘“Our Will Shakespeare” and Lope de Vega: an unrecorded contemporary document’, Shakespeare Survey, 16 (1963), 118-20

Moryson: Fynes Moryson, An Itinerary (1617; Glasgow, 1907)

Muir: Kenneth Muir, Shakespeare as Collaborator (1960)

Murray: Peter B. Murray, ‘The authorship of The Revenger's Tragedy’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 56 (1962), 195-218

N&Q: Notes and Queries

Nashe: R. B. McKerrow, ed., The Works of Thomas Nashe, 5 vols, 2nd edn, ed., F. P. Wilson (1958)

Nosworthy: J. M. Nosworthy, ‘All too short a date: internal evidence in Shakespeare's Sonnets’, EC, 2 (1952), 311-24

Nowottny: Winifred Nowottny, The Language Poets Use (1962)

ODQ: The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1979)

OED: The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1989)

Ovid, Met.: Ovid, Metamorphoses

Partridge, Bawdy: Eric Partridge, Shakespeare's Bawdy: A Literary and Psychological Essay and a Comprehensive Glossary, rev. edn (1955)

Partridge, Grammar: A. C. Partridge, A Substantive Grammar of Shakespeare's Nondramatic Texts (Virginia, 1976)

Partridge, Orthography: A. C. Partridge, Orthography in Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama (1964)

Peck: D. C. Peck, ‘“News from Heaven and Hell”: a defamatory narrative of the Earl of Leicester’, ELR, 8 (1978), 141-58

Pequigney: Joseph Pequigney, Such Is My Love: A Study of Shakespeare's Sonnets (Chicago and London, 1985)

PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America

Proudfoot: Richard Proudfoot, ‘The Reign of King Edward the Third (1596) and Shakespeare’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 71 (1985), 159-85

Race: Sidney Race, ‘J. P. Collier and the Dulwich Papers (cxv.33)’, N&Q, 195 (1950), 112-47

Ralegh: A. M. C. Latham, ed., The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh (1951)

RES: Review of English Studies

Robbins: R. H. Robbins, ‘A seventeenth-century manuscript of Shakespeare's Sonnet 128’, N&Q, 212 (1967), 137-8

Roche: T. P. Roche, Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences (New York, 1989)

Rollins: H. E. Rollins, ed., A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Sonnets, 2 vols (Philadelphia and London, 1944)

Rowse: A. L. Rowse, Shakespeare's Sonnets: the Problems Solved (1973)

RP: Richard Proudfoot, private communication

Schaar: Claes Schaar, Elizabethan Sonnet Themes and the Dating of Shakespeare's Sonnets, Lund Studies in English, 32 (1962)

Schmidgall: Gary Schmidgall, Shakespeare and the Poet's Life (Kentucky, 1990)

Schoenbaum, Life: Samuel Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (Oxford, 1975)

Schoenbaum, Lives: Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare's Lives, rev. edn (Oxford, 1991)

Schoenbaum, Records: Samuel Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: Records and Images (Oxford, 1981)

Sedgwick: Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick, Between Men (New York, 1985)

Sidney, AS: Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, in W. A. Ringler ed., The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford, 1962)

Sidney, CS: Sir Philip Sidney, Certain Sonnets, in W. A. Ringler, ed., The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford, 1962)

Sidney, NA: V. J. Skretkowicz, ed., The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (The New Arcadia) (Oxford, 1987)

Sidney, OA: Jean Robertson, ed., The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (The Old Arcadia) (Oxford, 1973)

Sidney, Poems: W. A. Ringler, ed., The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford, 1962)

Sidney, Prose: Katherine Duncan-Jones & J. van Dorsten, eds, Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford, 1973)

Robert Sidney, Poems: P. J. Croft, ed., Poems of Sir Robert Sidney (1984)

Sisson: C. J. Sisson, New Readings in Shakespeare, 2 vols (1956)

Slater: Eliot Slater, ‘Shakespeare: word links between poems and plays’, N&Q, 220 (1975), 157-63

SP: Studies in Philology

Spenser, FQ: Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, rev. edn (1977)

Spenser, Prose Works: Rudolf Gottfried, ed., Spenser's Prose Works (Baltimore, 1949)

Spenser, Shorter Poems: W. A. Oram, ed., The Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser (New Haven, 1989)

STC: A. W. Pollard & G. R. Redgrave, A Short-title Catalogue of Books printed in England, Scotland and Ireland 1475-1640, rev. W. A. Jackson and F. S. Ferguson, completed by Katharine F. Pantzer, 3 vols (1989-91)

Stone: Donald Stone, Ronsard's Sonnet Cycles: A Study in Tone and Vision (New Haven and London, 1966)

Suckling, Plays: L. A. Beaurline, ed., The Works of Sir John Suckling: The Plays (1971)

Taylor, ‘Some MSS’: Gary Taylor, ‘Some manuscripts of Shakespeare's Sonnets’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 68 (1985-6), 210-46

Tennyson: Christopher Ricks, ed., The Poems of Tennyson, 2nd edn (Harlow, 1987)

Tilley: Morris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor, 1950)

TLS: The Times Literary Supplement

TxC: Stanley Wells & Gary Taylor, with John Jowett & William Montgomery, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford, 1987)

Ungerer: Gustav Ungerer, A Spaniard in Elizabethan England: The Correspondence of Antonio Perez's Exile, 2 vols (1975)

Vendler: Helen Vendler, ‘Reading stage by stage: Shakespeare's Sonnets’, in Russ McDonald, ed., Shakespeare Reread: The Texts in New Contexts (Ithaca and London, 1994), 23-41

Weever: John Weever, Epigrammes (1599), ed. E. A. J. Honigmann, in John Weever (1987)

Whitlock: Baird W. Whitlock, John Hoskyns, Serjeant-at-Law (Washington, 1982)

Wilde, Letters: Rupert Hart-Davis, ed., The Letters of Oscar Wilde (1962)

Wilde, ‘W. H.’ Oscar Wilde, ‘The Portrait of Master W. H.’, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, July 1889

Wiles: David Wiles, Shakespeare's Almanac: ‘A Midsummer Night's Dream’, Marriage and the Elizabethan Calendar (1993)

Wilson: F. P. Wilson, The Plague in Shakespeare's London (1927)

Wyatt: R. A. Rebholz, ed., Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt (1978)