Shakespeare: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd Chapter 52

You Have Not the Booke of Riddles About You.  Have You?

Are Shakespeare's sonnets an authentic representation of Shakespeare's personal experience, or are they exercises in the dramatic art?  Could they have begun as testimonies to real people and real actions and then they slowly changed into a poetic performance to be judged on its own terms?

The first of them are overtly addressed to a young man, who is encouraged to marry and to breed so that his beauteous image may stay in the world through his heirs. There has been endless speculation as to who the young man referred to in the poem is.  Many biographers have pointed the finger to the Earl of Southampton. The creation of the sonnets was said to be commissioned by his irate mother after he refused to marry Lady Elizabeth de Vere.  But the situation occurred in 1591, too early for the composition of the sonnets.

Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton
One of the candidates for the  sonnet encouraging a young man to marry

A more appropriate candidate appears to be William Herbert, the future Earl of Pembroke.  In 1595, at the age of fifteen, he was being urged by his immediate family to marry the daughter of Sir George Carey, but he refused.  Since William’s father was the patron of the company acted and wrote his plays, it would have been natural for him to ask Shakespeare to provide some poetry of persuasion.

William Herbert, 1st Earl of Pembroke
The most likely candidate for the young man sonnet and a patron of Shakespeare's company.

There was another fruitless marriage plan for William Herbert concocted by his family in 1597, which could have provided a similar opportunity in 1597 but the reluctance of the fifteen-year-old Herbert seems a better context in Shakespeare’s advice.  It may also help to clear up the confusion concerning the publisher’s later dedication to “Mr. W.H.”.

William Herbert entered Shakespeare’s life at an opportune moment.  The First Folio of Shakespeare’s work was dedicated to him and his brother Philip.  Of the plays, it is stated that the Pembroke brothers “have prosequuted both them, and their Author living, with so much favour” and that “you will use the indulgence toward them, you have done unto their parent.”  This implies some deep reserve of affection and respect, towards Shakespeare.  It has sometimes been suggested that noblemen so eminent as the Pembroke brothers would not have formed any attachment to an actor and playwright but this was not the case.  When Richard Burbage died in 1619, Pembroke wrote to the Earl of Carlisle that “there was a great supper to the French Ambassador this night here, and 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.”  The loss of Shakespeare three years before had no doubt aroused the same sentiment.

Philip Herbert, brother to the 1st Earl of Pembroke and patron of Shakespeare's company

There have been many attempts to construct a coherent narrative out of Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence.  The first seventeen are overtly concerned with pressing matrimony upon a sweet boy whom the poet addresses.  Then the sequence changes once again with the final twenty-seven sonnets concerned with the deceitful “Dark Lady.”

There are very clear associations between the sonnets and some of the earlier plays, which seem to clinch the argument that Shakespeare began his sequence in the mid-1590s.  There are particular associations with The Comedy of Errors, The Two Gentleman of Verona, Love’s Labour’s Lost and the disputed Edward the Third.  There are complete sonnets in Love’s Labour’s Lost, suggesting the complementary of Shakespeare’s invention; in that play there is also a dark beauty, Rosaline, who may or not be related to the lady in the poetic sequence.  We can only say with certainty that Shakespeare was playing with the dramatic possibilities of a black mistress.  In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Valentine renounces Silvia for the sake of his friendship with Proteus.

The poems are perhaps best seen as a performance.  Shakespeare seems to have been able to think and write in quatrains without much effort, which shows a very high degree of poetic intelligence.  It is of some interest that, on five occasions in his plays, Shakespeare associates poetry with invention.

The first publication of the sonnets was in 1609.  This was followed by a longer poem, “The Lover’s Complaint”.  The whole exercise was perhaps a way of asserting his worth as a poet.  The question that is often asked by scholars over the generations are if these ventures were dramatic rhetoric or impassioned messages to a lover? – are, of course, unanswerable.  Wherever we look in Shakespeare’s work, we see the impossibility of assigning purpose or unassailable meaning.

This, of course, flies in the face of those who looked for parallels in Shakespeare’s private life for the characters in the poems.  There are references to a rival poet, claiming the favour of this young man and have been interpreted as allusions to Samuel Daniel, Christopher Marlowe, Barnaby Barnes, George Chapman and assorted other versifiers.  The ‘lovely Boy” and object to the poet’s passion has been identified with the earl of Southampton.  In the late sixteenth century the impropriety of addressing a young earl in that manner would have been quite apparent; to accuse him of the dissoluteness and infidelity.  The “Dark Lady” has been variously identified as Mary Fitton, Emilia Lanier, and a black prostitute from Turnmill in Clerkenwell.  Elaborate stories have been written about Emilia Lanier abandoning Shakespeare for a passionate affair with Southampton; the suggestion being that the whole experience of loss was then darkened by the threat of contracting a venereal disease from the faithless woman.

Emilia Lanier was certainly well known to Shakespeare.  She was the young mistress of Lord Hunsdon who had been the patron of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and was also related to Robert Johnson, a musician who collaborated with the dramatist on several occasions.  She was a poet too who at a later dedicated one of her volumes to the Countess of Pembroke.  Born Emilia Bassano, she was the illegitimate daughter of Baptist Bassano, one of a Jewish family from Venice who had become the court musicians.  He had died early, and in her youth, Emilia had become the ward of the Countess of Kent before attending court where she “had been favoured much of Her Majesty and many noblemen.  Among those noblemen was the old Lord Hunsdon, fifty years her senior; but, when she became pregnant, she was married off “for colour” to a “minstrel” named Alphonse Lanier.

Emilia Lanier
Possibly the Dark Lady of the sonnet.

Members of the Bassano family accompanied the performances of Shakespeare’s plays in the royal palaces.  They were dark-skinned Venetians, and some of Emilia’s relatives were described as “black men”.  It may not entirely be coincidental that Shakespeare wrote a play about a Jewish family in Venice and that one of the central characters is named Bassanio.  Here we may observe upon Shakespeare’s manner of invention, Baptist Bassano is split in two.  He becomes Shylock, the Venetian Jewish merchant, and also the Venetian Bassanio.  Shakespeare loved the process of self-division.  There may of course be some association, too, with Othello, also set in Venice.  And there is the connection already noted with Rosaline of Love’s Labour’s Lost who is described as being “black as ebony”.

Emilia Lanier nee Bassano appears most clearly in the historical record by way of journals by Simon Forman, the Elizabethan magus whom she consulted over the fortunes of her husband.  It is also clear that the good doctor seduced her, and the was neither the first, nor the last to do so.  It can’t be known if she ever became Shakespeare’s lover and, even if she was, whether she is the faithless lady of the sonnets.  There is, however, one suggestive detail.  Simon Forman notes that Emilia Lanier has a mole below her throat; in Cymbeline Shakespeare describes a more under the breast of the beautiful (and chaste) Imogene.