It may seem strange that so great a dramatist as Shakespeare, who realised his own perfection as an artist and his humanity as a man on the ideal plane of stage-writing and stage-playing, should have written in these terms about the theatre; but we must remember that in Sonnets CX.
and CXI. Shakespeare shows us that he too was wearied of the world of puppets, and full of shame at having made himself "a motley to the view."
The 111th Sonnet is especially bitter:-
O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide, The guilty G.o.ddess of my harmful deeds, That did not better for my life provide Than public means which public manners breeds.
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand, And almost thence my nature is subdued To what it works in, like the dyer"s hand: Pity me then and wish I were renew"d-
and there are many signs elsewhere of the same feeling, signs familiar to all real students of Shakespeare.
One point puzzled me immensely as I read the Sonnets, and it was days before I struck on the true interpretation, which indeed Cyril Graham himself seems to have missed. I could not understand how it was that Shakespeare set so high a value on his young friend marrying. He himself had married young, and the result had been unhappiness, and it was not likely that he would have asked Willie Hughes to commit the same error.
The boy-player of Rosalind had nothing to gain from marriage, or from the pa.s.sions of real life. The early sonnets, with their strange entreaties to have children, seemed to me a jarring note. The explanation of the mystery came on me quite suddenly, and I found it in the curious dedication. It will be remembered that the dedication runs as follows:-
TO THE ONLIE BEGETTER OF THESE INSUING SONNETS MR. W. H. ALL HAPPINESSE AND THAT ETERNITIE PROMISED BY OUR EVER-LIVING POET WISHETH THE WELL-WISHING ADVENTURER IN SETTING FORTH.
T. T.
Some scholars have supposed that the word "begetter" in this dedication means simply the procurer of the Sonnets for Thomas Thorpe the publisher; but this view is now generally abandoned, and the highest authorities are quite agreed that it is to be taken in the sense of inspirer, the metaphor being drawn from the a.n.a.logy of physical life. Now I saw that the same metaphor was used by Shakespeare himself all through the poems, and this set me on the right track. Finally I made my great discovery.
The marriage that Shakespeare proposes for Willie Hughes is the marriage with his Muse, an expression which is definitely put forward in the 82nd Sonnet, where, in the bitterness of his heart at the defection of the boy-actor for whom he had written his greatest parts, and whose beauty had indeed suggested them, he opens his complaint by saying-
I grant thou wert not married to my Muse.
The children he begs him to beget are no children of flesh and blood, but more immortal children of undying fame. The whole cycle of the early sonnets is simply Shakespeare"s invitation to Willie Hughes to go upon the stage and become a player. How barren and profitless a thing, he says, is this beauty of yours if it be not used:-
When forty winters shall besiege thy brow And dig deep trenches in thy beauty"s field, Thy youth"s proud livery, so gazed on now, Will be a tatter"d weed, of small worth held: Then being ask"d where all thy beauty lies, Where all the treasure of thy l.u.s.ty days, To say, within thine own deep-sunken eyes, Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.
You must create something in art: my verse "is thine, and _born_ of thee"; only listen to me, and I will "_bring forth_ eternal numbers to outlive long date," and you shall people with forms of your own image the imaginary world of the stage. These children that you beget, he continues, will not wither away, as mortal children do, but you shall live in them and in my plays: do but-
Make thee another self, for love of me, That beauty still may live in thine or thee.
I collected all the pa.s.sages that seemed to me to corroborate this view, and they produced a strong impression on me, and showed me how complete Cyril Graham"s theory really was. I also saw that it was quite easy to separate those lines in which he speaks of the Sonnets themselves from those in which he speaks of his great dramatic work. This was a point that had been entirely overlooked by all critics up to Cyril Graham"s day. And yet it was one of the most important points in the whole series of poems. To the Sonnets Shakespeare was more or less indifferent. He did not wish to rest his fame on them. They were to him his "slight Muse," as he calls them, and intended, as Meres tells us, for private circulation only among a few, a very few, friends. Upon the other hand he was extremely conscious of the high artistic value of his plays, and shows a n.o.ble self-reliance upon his dramatic genius. When he says to Willie Hughes:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest; Nor shall Death brag thou wander"st in his shade, When in _eternal lines_ to time thou grow"st: So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee;-
the expression "eternal lines" clearly alludes to one of his plays that he was sending him at the time, just as the concluding couplet points to his confidence in the probability of his plays being always acted. In his address to the Dramatic Muse (Sonnets C. and CI.), we find the same feeling.
Where art thou, Muse, that thou forget"st so long To speak of that which gives thee all thy might?
Spend"st thou thy fury on some worthless song, Darkening thy power to lend base subjects light?
he cries, and he then proceeds to reproach the Mistress of Tragedy and Comedy for her "neglect of Truth in Beauty dyed," and says-
Because he needs no praise, wilt thou be dumb?
Excuse not silence so, for "t lies in thee To make him much outlive a gilded tomb And to be praised of ages yet to be.
Then do thy office, Muse; I teach thee how To make him seem long hence as he shows now.
It is, however, perhaps in the 55th Sonnet that Shakespeare gives to this idea its fullest expression. To imagine that the "powerful rhyme" of the second line refers to the sonnet itself, is to mistake Shakespeare"s meaning entirely. It seemed to me that it was extremely likely, from the general character of the sonnet, that a particular play was meant, and that the play was none other but _Romeo and Juliet_.
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme; But you shall shine more bright in these contents Than unswept stone besmear"d with s.l.u.ttish time.
When wasteful wars shall statues overturn, And broils root out the work of masonry, Nor Mars his sword nor war"s quick fire shall burn The living record of your memory.
"Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room Even in the eyes of all posterity That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgement that yourself arise, You live in this, and dwell in lovers" eyes.
It was also extremely suggestive to note how here as elsewhere Shakespeare promised Willie Hughes immortality in a form that appealed to men"s eyes-that is to say, in a spectacular form, in a play that is to be looked at.
For two weeks I worked hard at the Sonnets, hardly ever going out, and refusing all invitations. Every day I seemed to be discovering something new, and Willie Hughes became to me a kind of spiritual presence, an ever-dominant personality. I could almost fancy that I saw him standing in the shadow of my room, so well had Shakespeare drawn him, with his golden hair, his tender flower-like grace, his dreamy deep-sunken eyes, his delicate mobile limbs, and his white lily hands. His very name fascinated me. Willie Hughes! Willie Hughes! How musically it sounded!
Yes; who else but he could have been the master-mistress of Shakespeare"s pa.s.sion, {1} the lord of his love to whom he was bound in va.s.salage, {2} the delicate minion of pleasure, {3} the rose of the whole world, {4} the herald of the spring {5} decked in the proud livery of youth, {6} the lovely boy whom it was sweet music to hear, {7} and whose beauty was the very raiment of Shakespeare"s heart, {8} as it was the keystone of his dramatic power? How bitter now seemed the whole tragedy of his desertion and his shame!-shame that he made sweet and lovely {9} by the mere magic of his personality, but that was none the less shame. Yet as Shakespeare forgave him, should not we forgive him also? I did not care to pry into the mystery of his sin.
His abandonment of Shakespeare"s theatre was a different matter, and I investigated it at great length. Finally I came to the conclusion that Cyril Graham had been wrong in regarding the rival dramatist of the 80th Sonnet as Chapman. It was obviously Marlowe who was alluded to. At the time the Sonnets were written, such an expression as "the proud full sail of his great verse" could not have been used of Chapman"s work, however applicable it might have been to the style of his later Jacobean plays.
No: Marlowe was clearly the rival dramatist of whom Shakespeare spoke in such laudatory terms; and that
Affable familiar ghost Which nightly gulls him with intelligence,
was the Mephistopheles of his _Doctor Faustus_. No doubt, Marlowe was fascinated by the beauty and grace of the boy-actor, and lured him away from the Blackfriars Theatre, that he might play the Gaveston of his _Edward II_. That Shakespeare had the legal right to retain Willie Hughes in his own company is evident from Sonnet Lx.x.xVII., where he says:-
Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing, And like enough thou know"st thy estimate: The _charter of thy worth_ gives thee releasing; My _bonds_ in thee are all determinate.
For how do I hold thee but by thy granting?
And for that riches where is my deserving?
The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting, _And so my patent back again is swerving_.
Thyself thou gayest, thy own worth then not knowing, Or me, to whom thou gavest it, else mistaking; So thy great gift, upon misprision growing, Comes home again, on better judgement making.
Thus have I had thee, as a dream doth flatter, In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.
But him whom he could not hold by love, he would not hold by force.
Willie Hughes became a member of Lord Pembroke"s company, and, perhaps in the open yard of the Red Bull Tavern, played the part of King Edward"s delicate minion. On Marlowe"s death, he seems to have returned to Shakespeare, who, whatever his fellow-partners may have thought of the matter, was not slow to forgive the wilfulness and treachery of the young actor.
How well, too, had Shakespeare drawn the temperament of the stage-player!
Willie Hughes was one of those
That do not do the thing they most do show, Who, moving others, are themselves as stone.
He could act love, but could not feel it, could mimic pa.s.sion without realising it.
In many"s looks the false heart"s history Is writ in moods and frowns and wrinkles strange,
but with Willie Hughes it was not so. "Heaven," says Shakespeare, in a sonnet of mad idolatry-
Heaven in thy creation did decree That in thy face sweet love should ever dwell; Whate"er thy thoughts or thy heart"s workings be, Thy looks should nothing thence but sweetness tell.
In his "inconstant mind" and his "false heart," it was easy to recognise the insincerity and treachery that somehow seem inseparable from the artistic nature, as in his love of praise that desire for immediate recognition that characterises all actors. And yet, more fortunate in this than other actors, Willie Hughes was to know something of immortality. Inseparably connected with Shakespeare"s plays, he was to live in them.
Your name from hence immortal life shall have, Though I, once gone, to all the world must die: The earth can yield me but a common grave, When you entombed in men"s eyes shall lie.
Your monument shall be my gentle verse, Which eyes not yet created shall o"er-read, And tongues to be your being shall rehea.r.s.e, When all the breathers of this world are dead.
There were endless allusions, also, to Willie Hughes"s power over his audience-the "gazers," as Shakespeare calls them; but perhaps the most perfect description of his wonderful mastery over dramatic art was in _A Lover"s Complaint_, where Shakespeare says of him:-
In him a plenitude of subtle matter, Applied to cautels, all strange forms receives, Of burning blushes, or of weeping water, Or swooning paleness; and he takes and leaves, In either"s aptness, as it best deceives, To blush at speeches rank, to weep at woes, Or to turn white and swoon at tragic shows.
So on the tip of his subduing tongue, All kind of arguments and questions deep, All replication prompt and reason strong, For his advantage still did wake and sleep, To make the weeper laugh, the laugher weep.
He had the dialect and the different skill, Catching all pa.s.sions in his craft of will.