Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems Part 3

In Sonnet CXXII. he says:

Thy gift, thy tables, are within my brain

Beyond all date, even to eternity: Or, at the least, _so long as brain and heart_ Have faculty by nature to subsist; Till each to razed oblivion yield his part.

In Sonnet CXLVI. he says:

Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth, . . . these rebel powers that thee array, Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth, Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?

Why so large cost, having _so short_ a lease, Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?

Shall worms, inheritors of this excess, Eat up thy charge? is this thy body's end?

Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss, And let that pine to aggravate thy store; Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross; Within be fed, without be rich no more: So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men, And Death once dead, there's no more dying then.

In Sonnets LXVI. and LXXIV. appear further similar meditations. Such thoughts and meditations do not seem to be those of the successful and prosperous man of thirty or thirty-five.

The persuasive force of the Sonnets which have been quoted or referred to in this chapter is much increased by reading or considering them together. To ill.u.s.trate: four Sonnets have been quoted containing direct statements by the poet that he was in the afternoon of life. It needs no argument to establish that this concurrence of statements made in different groups of Sonnets and doubtless at different times has much more than four times the persuasive force of one such statement. And in like ratio do the other Sonnets indicating the reflections and conditions of age, increase the weight of the statements in these four Sonnets. Taking them all together they seem to present the statements, conditions, and reflections of a man certainly past the noon of life,--past forty years of age, and so older than was Shakespeare at the time of their composition.

If this conclusion is correct, it does not aid, but about equally repels the claim that Bacon was the author of the Sonnets, or of the plays or poems produced by the same poet. Bacon was born in 1561, and was therefore but three years older than Shakespeare.

Footnotes:

[8] Lee's _Life of Shakespeare_, p. 87; Preface to Sonnets, Temple Edition.

[9] In a note to page 30 is the poet's familiar expression or statement of the Seven Ages of man. It clearly places the decade from forty to fifty as past the middle arch of life, and next to the age of the slippered pantaloon and shrunk shank; from thirty to forty he describes as the age of the soldier, and from twenty to thirty that of the lover.

[10] It is generally considered that the first of the Shakespearean plays was produced in 1591. If they were written by an unknown poet and brought out or published by Shakespeare, the time between their first joint venture and the earlier date a.s.sumed for these Sonnets, would be _three years_.

[11] The phrase "mine eye may be deceived," may also throw some light on another subject discussed in this chapter,--the age of the poet.

Such an expression would seem much more natural to a person above, than to a person below, forty years of age.

[12] See discussion of claim that this Sonnet was addressed to Cupid, pages 14, 15.

[13] _As You Like It_, Act II., Sc. VII.:

"All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages. At first the infant, Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.

Then the whining school-boy, with his satchel And s.h.i.+ning morning face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school. And then the lover, Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier, Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard, Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel, Seeking the bubble reputation Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice, In fair round belly with good capon lined, With eyes severe and beard of formal cut, Full of wise saws and modern instances; And so he plays his part. The sixth age s.h.i.+fts Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon, With spectacles on nose and pouch on side, His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice, Turning again toward childish treble, pipes And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childishness and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans every thing."

[14] Page 28, _supra_.

[15] In Lee's _Life of Shakespeare_, p. 143, appear some statements so relevant to this discussion that I cannot forbear quoting them:

"Octavius Caesar at thirty-two is described by Mark Antony after the battle of Actium as the 'boy Caesar' who 'wears the rose of youth' (_Antony and Cleopatra_, III., ii., 17 _seq._). Spenser in his _Astrophel_ apostrophizes Sir Philip Sidney on his death near the close of his thirty-second year as 'oh wretched boy' (l. 133) and 'luckless boy' (l. 142)."

I was at a public dinner given some years ago, at which General Henry W. Sloc.u.m and Colonel Fred Grant were both speakers. In his remarks, the General, having stated that his friend the Colonel spoke to him about being a candidate for an office, continued, "I said to him, 'Why, Fred, you are a mere boy,' and his answer to me was, 'Why, General, I am as old as my father was when he took Vicksburg.'"

General Grant was then forty years old.

[16] Post., pp. 68-70.

[17] Lee's _Shakespeare_, pp. 19-22.

[18] Post., pp. 66-68.

[19] Post., pp. 60-66.

[20] Post., p. 66.

[21] Lee's _Shakespeare_, p. 85.

CHAPTER III

OF THE DIRECT TESTIMONY OF THE SONNETS AS TO WHO WAS NOT THEIR AUTHOR

Sonnets LV. and Lx.x.xI. are as follows:

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme; But _you_ shall s.h.i.+ne more bright in these contents Than unswept stone, besmear'd with s.l.u.ttish time.

When wasteful war 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 judgment that yourself arise, _You_ live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes.

Or I shall live your epitaph to make, Or you survive when I in earth am rotten; From hence _your_ memory death cannot take, Although in _me_ each part will be forgotten.

_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; _You_ still shall live--such virtue hath _my_ pen-- Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.

In all the plays and poems of Shakespeare, including these Sonnets, there is no mention of any man or woman then living. The only mention of a person then living made by our poet, either in prose or verse, is in the dedication of the two poems to the Earl of Southampton. To Shakespeare, to Shakespeare alone, have the Shakespearean poems and plays been a monument; and for him have they done precisely that which the poet says his "gentle verse" was to do for his friend; and they have not done so in any degree for any other.

An anonymous writer in Chambers's _Edinburgh Journal_, in August, 1852, seems to have been one of the first to suggest the doubt as to the authors.h.i.+p of the Shakespearean plays. His suggestion was that their real author was "some pale, wasted student ... with eyes of genius gleaming through despair" who found in Shakespeare a purchaser, a publisher, a friend, and a patron. If that theory is correct, the man that penned those Sonnets sleeps, as he said he would, in an unrecorded grave, while his publisher, friend and patron, precisely as he also said, has a place in the Pantheon of the immortals.

Very many of these Sonnets seem to be evolved from, or kindred to, the thought so sharply presented in Sonnets LV. and Lx.x.xI. I would refer the reader particularly to Sonnets x.x.xVIII., XLIX., LXXI., LXXII, and Lx.x.xVIII. The last two lines of Sonnet LXXI. are as follows:

Lest the _wise_ world should look into your moan, And mock you with me after I am gone.

The first lines of Sonnet LXXII. are as follows:

O! lest the world should task you to recite What merit lived in me, that you should love After my death, dear love, forget me quite, For you in me can nothing worthy prove; Unless you would devise some virtuous lie, To do more for me than mine own desert, And hang more praise upon deceased I Than _n.i.g.g.ard_ truth would _willingly_ impart:

Many of these Sonnets, which otherwise seem entirely inexplicable, and which have for that reason been held to be imitations or strange and unnatural conceits, become true and genuine and much more poetic, if we conceive them to be written, not by the accredited author of the Shakespearean dramas, but by the unnamed and unknown student whose connection with them was carefully concealed. I suggest that the reader test this statement by carefully reading the four Sonnets last mentioned.

The claim for a literal reading of Sonnet Lx.x.xI. is greatly strengthened by its context, by reading it with the group of Sonnets of which it forms a part. Sonnets LXXVII. to XC. all more or less relate to another poet, who, the author fears, has supplanted him in the affection, or it may be, in the patronage of his friend. That particularly appears in Sonnet Lx.x.xVI.: