A Life of William Shakespeare Part 28

Imprisonment, 1601-3.

The story of Southampton's marriage was soon public property. His wife quickly became a mother, and when he crossed the Channel a few weeks later to revisit her he was received by pursuivants, who had the Queen's orders to carry him to the Fleet prison. For the time his career was ruined. Although he was soon released from gaol, all avenues to the Queen's favour were closed to him. He sought employment in the wars in Ireland, but high command was denied him. Helpless and hopeless, he late in 1600 joined Ess.e.x, another fallen favourite, in fomenting a rebellion in London, in order to regain by force the positions each had forfeited.

The attempt at insurrection failed, and the conspirators stood their trial on a capital charge of treason on February 19, 1600-1. Southampton was condemned to die, but the Queen's Secretary pleaded with her that 'the poor young earl, merely for the love of Ess.e.x, had been drawn into this action,' and his punishment was commuted to imprisonment for life.

Further mitigation was not to be looked for while the Queen lived. But Ess.e.x, Southampton's friend, had been James's sworn ally. The first act of James I as monarch of England was to set Southampton free (April 10, 1603). After a confinement of more than two years, Southampton resumed, under happier auspices, his place at Court.

Later career. Death on Nov. 10, 1624.

Southampton's later career does not directly concern the student of Shakespeare's biography. After Shakespeare had congratulated Southampton on his liberty in his Sonnet cvii., there is no trace of further relations between them, although there is no reason to doubt that they remained friends to the end. Southampton on his release from prison was immediately installed a Knight of the Garter, and was appointed governor of the Isle of Wight, while an Act of Parliament relieved him of all the disabilities incident to his conviction of treason. He was thenceforth a prominent figure in Court festivities. He twice danced a correnta with the Queen at the magnificent entertainment given at Whitehall on August 19, 1604, in honour of the Constable of Castile, the special amba.s.sador of Spain, who had come to sign a treaty of peace between his sovereign and James I. {380} But home politics proved no congenial field for the exercise of Southampton's energies. Quarrels with fellow-courtiers continued to jeopardise his fortunes. With Sir Robert Cecil, with Philip Herbert, Earl of Montgomery, and with the Duke of Buckingham he had violent disputes. It was in the schemes for colonising the New World that Southampton found an outlet for his impulsive activity. He helped to equip expeditions to Virginia, and acted as treasurer of the Virginia Company. The map of the country commemorates his labours as a colonial pioneer. In his honour were named Southampton Hundred, Hampton River, and Hampton Roads in Virginia. Finally, in the summer of 1624, at the age of fifty-one, Southampton, with characteristic spirit, took command of a troop of English volunteers which was raised to aid the Elector Palatine, husband of James I's daughter Elizabeth, in his struggle with the Emperor and the Catholics of Central Europe. With him went his eldest son, Lord Wriothesley. Both on landing in the Low Countries were attacked by fever. The younger man succ.u.mbed at once. The Earl regained sufficient strength to accompany his son's body to Bergen-op-Zoom, but there, on November 10, he himself died of a lethargy. Father and son were both buried in the chancel of the church of t.i.tchfield, Hamps.h.i.+re, on December 28. Southampton thus outlived Shakespeare by more than eight years.

IV.--THE EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON AS A LITERARY PATRON.

Southampton's collection of books.

Southampton's close relations with men of letters of his time give powerful corroboration of the theory that he was the patron whom Shakespeare commemorated in the sonnets. From earliest to latest manhood--throughout the dissipations of Court life, amid the torments that his intrigue cost him, in the distractions of war and travel--the earl never ceased to cherish the pa.s.sion for literature which was implanted in him in boyhood. His devotion to his old college, St.

John's, is characteristic. When a new library was in course of construction there during the closing years of his life, Southampton collected books to the value of 360 pounds wherewith to furnish it. This 'monument of love,' as the College authorities described the benefaction, may still be seen on the shelves of the College library. The gift largely consisted of illuminated ma.n.u.scripts--books of hours, legends of the saints, and mediaeval chronicles. Southampton caused his son to be educated at St. John's, and his wife expressed to the tutors the hope that the boy would 'imitate' his father 'in his love to learning and to them.'

References in his letters to poems and plays.

Even the State papers and business correspondence in which Southampton's career is traced are enlivened by references to his literary interests.

Especially refres.h.i.+ng are the active signs vouchsafed there of his sympathy with the great birth of English drama. It was with plays that he joined other n.o.blemen in 1598 in entertaining his chief, Sir Robert Cecil, on the eve of the departure for Paris of that emba.s.sy in which Southampton served Cecil as a secretary. In July following Southampton contrived to enclose in an official despatch from Paris 'certain songs'

which he was anxious that Sir Robert Sidney, a friend of literary tastes, should share his delight in reading. Twelve months later, while Southampton was in Ireland, a letter to him from the Countess attested that current literature was an everyday topic of their private talk.

'All the news I can send you,' she wrote to her husband, 'that I think will make you merry, is that I read in a letter from London that Sir John Falstaff is, by his mistress Dame Pintpot, made father of a goodly miller's thumb--a boy that's all head and very little body; but this is a secret.' {383a} This cryptic sentence proves on the part of both earl and countess familiarity with Falstaff's adventures in Shakespeare's 'Henry IV,' where the fat knight apostrophised Mrs. Quickly as 'good pint pot' (Pt. I. II. iv. 443). Who the acquaintances were about whom the countess jested thus lightly does not appear, but that Sir John, the father of 'the boy that was all head and very little body,' was a playful allusion to Sir John's creator is by no means beyond the bounds of possibility. In the letters of Sir Toby Matthew, many of which were written very early in the seventeenth century (although first published in 1660), the sobriquet of Sir John Falstaff seems to have been bestowed on Shakespeare: 'As that excellent author Sir John Falstaff sayes, "what for your businesse, news, device, foolerie, and libertie, I never dealt better since I was a man."' {383b}

His love of the theatre.

When, after leaving Ireland, Southampton spent the autumn of 1599 in London, it was recorded that he and his friend Lord Rutland 'come not to Court' but 'pa.s.s away the time merely in going to plays every day.'

{383c} It seems that the fascination that the drama had for Southampton and his friends led them to exaggerate the influence that it was capable of exerting on the emotions of the mult.i.tude. Southampton and Ess.e.x in February 1601 requisitioned and paid for the revival of Shakespeare's 'Richard II' at the Globe Theatre on the day preceding that fixed for their insurrection, in the hope that the play-scene of the deposition of a king might excite the citizens of London to countenance their rebellious design. {383d} Imprisonment sharpened Southampton's zest for the theatre. Within a year of his release from the Tower in 1603 he entertained Queen Anne of Denmark at his house in the Strand, and Burbage and his fellow players, one of whom was Shakespeare, were bidden to present the 'old' play of 'Love's Labour's Lost,' whose 'wit and mirth'

were calculated 'to please her Majesty exceedingly.'

Poetic adulation. Barnabe Barnes's sonnet, 1593.

But these are merely accidental testimonies to Southampton's literary predilections. It is in literature itself, not in the prosaic records of his political or domestic life, that the amplest proofs survive of his devotion to letters. From the hour that, as a handsome and accomplished lad, he joined the Court and made London his chief home, authors acknowledged his appreciation of literary effort of almost every quality and form. He had in his Italian tutor Florio, whose circle of acquaintance included all men of literary reputation, a mentor who allowed no work of promise to escape his observation. Every note in the scale of adulation was sounded in Southampton's honour in contemporary prose and verse. Soon after the publication, in April 1593, of Shakespeare's 'Venus and Adonis,' with its salutation of Southampton, a more youthful apprentice to the poet's craft, Barnabe Barnes, confided to a published sonnet of unrestrained fervour his conviction that Southampton's eyes--'those heavenly lamps'--were the only sources of true poetic inspiration. The sonnet, which is superscribed 'to the Right n.o.ble and Virtuous Lord, Henry, Earl of Southampton,' runs:

Receive, sweet Lord, with thy thrice sacred hand (Which sacred Muses make their instrument) These worthless leaves, which I to thee present, (Sprung from a rude and unmanured land) That with your countenance graced, they may withstand Hundred-eyed Envy's rough encounterment, Whose patronage can give encouragement To scorn back-wounding Zoilus his band.

Vouchsafe, right virtuous Lord, with gracious eyes-- Those heavenly lamps which give the Muses light, Which give and take in course that holy fire-- To view my Muse with your judicial sight: Whom, when time shall have taught, by flight, to rise Shall to thy virtues, of much worth, aspire.

Tom Nash's addresses.

Next year a writer of greater power, Tom Nash, betrayed little less enthusiasm when dedicating to the earl his masterly essay in romance, 'The Life of Jack Wilton.' He describes Southampton, who was then scarcely of age, as 'a dear lover and cherisher as well of the lovers of poets as of the poets themselves.' 'A new brain,' he exclaims, 'a new wit, a new style, a new soul, will I get me, to canonise your name to posterity, if in this my first attempt I am not taxed of presumption.'

{385a} Although 'Jack Wilton' was the first book Nash formally dedicated to Southampton, it is probable that Nash had made an earlier bid for the earl's patronage. In a digression at the close of his 'Pierce Pennilesse' he grows eloquent in praise of one whom he ent.i.tles 'the matchless image of honour and magnificent rewarder of vertue, Jove's eagle-borne Ganimede, thrice n.o.ble Amintas.' In a sonnet addressed to 'this renowned lord,' who 'draws all hearts to his love,' Nash expresses regret that the great poet, Edmund Spenser, had omitted to celebrate 'so special a pillar of n.o.bility' in the series of adulatory sonnets prefixed to the 'Faerie Queene;' and in the last lines of his sonnet Nash suggests that Spenser suppressed the n.o.bleman's name

Because few words might not comprise thy fame. {385b}

Southampton was beyond doubt the n.o.bleman in question. It is certain, too, that the Earl of Southampton was among the young men for whom Nash, in hope of gain, as he admitted, penned 'amorous villanellos and qui pa.s.sas.' One of the least reputable of these efforts of Nash survives in an obscene love-poem ent.i.tled 'The Choosing of Valentines,' which may be dated in 1595. Not only was this dedicated to Southampton in a prefatory sonnet, but in an epilogue, again in the form of a sonnet, Nash addressed his young patron as his 'friend.' {386}

Markham's sonnet, 1595. Florio's address, 1598.

Meanwhile, in 1595, the versatile Gervase Markham inscribed to Southampton, in a sonnet, his patriotic poem on Sir Richard Grenville's glorious fight off the Azores. Markham was not content to acknowledge with Barnes the inspiriting force of his patron's eyes, but with blasphemous temerity a.s.serted that the sweetness of his lips, which stilled the music of the spheres, delighted the ear of Almighty G.o.d.

Markham's sonnet runs somewhat haltingly thus:

Thou glorious laurel of the Muses' hill, Whose eyes doth crown the most victorious pen, Bright lamp of virtue, in whose sacred skill Lives all the bliss of ear-enchanting men, From graver subjects of thy grave a.s.says, Bend thy courageous thoughts unto these lines-- The grave from whence my humble Muse doth raise True honour's spirit in her rough designs-- And when the stubborn stroke of my harsh song Shall seasonless glide through Almighty ears Vouchsafe to sweet it with thy blessed tongue Whose well-tuned sound stills music in the spheres; So shall my tragic lays be blest by thee And from thy lips suck their eternity.

Subsequently Florio, in a.s.sociating the earl's name with his great Italian-English dictionary--the 'Worlde of Wordes'--more soberly defined the earl's place in the republic of letters when he wrote: 'As to me and many more the glorious and gracious suns.h.i.+ne of your honour hath infused light and life.'

The congratulations of the poets in 1603.

The most notable contribution to this chorus of praise is to be found, as I have already shown, in Shakespeare's 'Sonnets.' The same note of eulogy was sounded by men of letters until Southampton's death. When he was released from prison on James I's accession in April 1603, his praises in poets' mouths were especially abundant. Not only was that grateful incident celebrated by Shakespeare in what is probably the latest of his sonnets (No. cvii.), but Samuel Daniel and John Davies of Hereford offered the Earl congratulation in more prolonged strains.

Daniel addressed to Southampton many lines like these:

The world had never taken so full note Of what thou art, hadst thou not been undone: And only thy affliction hath begot More fame than thy best fortunes could have won; For ever by adversity are wrought The greatest works of admiration; And all the fair examples of renown Out of distress and misery are grown . . .

Only the best-compos'd and worthiest hearts G.o.d sets to act the hard'st and constanst'st parts. {388a}

Davies was more jubilant:

Now wisest men with mirth do seem stark mad, And cannot choose--their hearts are all so glad.

Then let's be merry in our G.o.d and King, That made us merry, being ill bestead.

Southampton, up thy cap to Heaven fling, And on the viol there sweet praises sing, For he is come that grace to all doth bring. {388b}

Many like praises, some of later date, by Henry Locke (or Lok), George Chapman, Joshua Sylvester, Richard Brathwaite, George Wither, Sir John Beaumont, and others could be quoted. Beaumont, on Southampton's death, wrote an elegy which panegyrises him in the varied capacities of warrior, councillor, courtier, father, and husband. But it is as a literary patron that Beaumont insists that he chiefly deserves remembrance:

I keep that glory last which is the best, The love of learning which he oft expressed In conversation, and respect to those Who had a name in arts, in verse or prose.

Elegies on Southampton.