Volume I Part 16 (2/2)
But heaven in thy creation did decree, That in thy face sweet love should ever dwell.
He bitterly reproaches her with her levity and falsehood, and himself that he can be thus unworthily enslaved,--
What potions have I drunk of Syren tears, &c.
Then, with lover-like inconsistency, excuses her,--
As on the finger of a throned queen The basest jewel will be well esteemed: So are those errors that in thee are seen To truths translated, and for true things deem'd.
And the following are powerfully and painfully expressive:--
How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame, Which, like the canker in a fragrant rose, Doth spot the beauty of thy budding name!
Oh, in what sweets dost thou thy sins enclose!
And what a mansion have those vices got, Which for their habitation chose out thee, Where Beauty's veil doth cover every blot, And all things turn to fair that eyes can see!
”Who taught thee,” he says in another sonnet,
--to make me love thee more The more I hear, and see just cause for hate?
He who wrote these and similar pa.s.sages was certainly under the full and irresistible influence of female fascination. But who it was that thus ruled the universal heart and mighty spirit of our Shakspeare, we know not. She stands beside him a veiled and a nameless phantom. Neither dare we call in Fancy to penetrate that veil; for who would presume to trace even the faintest outline of such a being as Shakspeare could have loved?
I think it doubtful to whom were addressed those exquisite lines,
Then hate me when thou wilt, if ever, now! &c.[100]
but probably to this very person.
The Sonnets in which he alludes to his profession as an actor; where he speaks of the brand, ”which vulgar scandal stamped upon his brow,” and of having made himself ”a motley to men's view,”[101] are undoubtedly addressed to Lord Southampton.
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 publick means, which public manners breeds; Thence comes it that my name receives a brand, And almost thence my nature is subdu'd To what it works in, like the dyer's hand.
Pity me then, and wish I were renew'd.
The last I shall remark, perhaps the finest of all, and breathing the very soul of profound tenderness and melancholy feeling, must, I think, have been addressed to a female.
No longer mourn for me when I am dead, Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell Give warning to the world that I am fled From this vile earth, with vilest worms to dwell: Nay, if you read this line, remember not The hand that writ it; for I love you so That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot, If thinking on me then should make you woe.
O if (I say) you look upon this verse, When I perhaps compounded am with clay, Do not so much as my poor name rehea.r.s.e; But let your love even with my life decay: Lest the wise world should look into your moan, And mock you with me after I am gone.
The period a.s.signed to the composition of these Sonnets, and the attachment which inspired them, is the time when Shakspeare was living a wild and irregular life, between the court and the theatre, after his flight from Stratford. He had previously married, at the age of seventeen, Judith Hathaway, who was eight or ten years older than himself: he returned to his native town, after having sounded all depths of life, of nature, of pa.s.sion, and ended his days as the respected father of a family, in calm, unostentatious privacy.
One thing I will confess:--It is natural to feel an intense and insatiable curiosity relative to great men, a curiosity and interest for which nothing can be too minute, too personal.--And yet when I had ransacked all that had ever been written, discovered, or surmised, relative to Shakspeare's private life, for the purpose of throwing some light upon his Sonnets, I felt no gratification, no thankfulness to those whose industry had raked up the very few particulars which can be known. It is too much, and it is not enough: it disappoints us in one point of view--it is superfluous in another: what need to surround with common-place, trivial a.s.sociations, registers of wills and genealogies, and I know not what,--the mighty spirit who in dying left behind him not merely a name and fame, but a perpetual being, a presence and a power, identified with our nature, diffused through all time, and ruling the heart and the fancy with an uncontrollable and universal sway!
I rejoice that the name of no one woman is popularly identified with that of Shakspeare. He belongs to us all!--the creator of Desdemona, and Juliet, and Ophelia, and Imogen, and Viola, and Constance, and Cornelia, and Rosalind, and Portia, was not the poet of one woman, but the POET OF WOMANKIND.
FOOTNOTES:
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