April i8, 1918 
Land Sc Water 
17 
Life and Letters mjJX- Squire 
Shakespeare's Sonnets 
IT is nearly twenty years since Messrs. Methuen, with 
Mr. W. j. Craig as editor, began the pubhcation of 
the Arden Shakespeare ; nearly ten since Mr. R. H. 
Case took over general control of the series; and, 
I should think, at least two since a volume was issued. 
Mr C. Knox Pooler's edition of the Sonnets (3s. net) has 
at last appeared. It was worth waiting for. 
****** 
The notes are considerably more voluminous than the 
text. This is not always a tribute to a poet's editor ; and it 
necessitates an arrangement of the page which makes the 
edition an inconvenient one for ordinary reading. At the 
same time, a man who should habitually read the Sonnets 
without an occasional hankering for a fully annotated edition 
would be more than human. Both their nature and their 
condition make them cry out for explanation. They appear 
to tell a story ; but what stoty ? They are evidently a 
sonnet sequence ; we have the sonnets, but almost certainly 
not the sequence. They are dedicated by the printer to a 
mysterious person whose identification might or might not 
provide a clue which would illuminate their whole content. 
They are full of phrases which need explanation, and words 
which open the door to conjecture ; the originals of the 
greater portion of our text are two evidently corrupt editions. 
One of these editions was published, apparently by a pirate, 
in Shakespeare's lifetime ; the other by an ignoramus 
twenty-four years after his death. On all sides we are 
besieged by questions. For whom did Shakespeare write 
them ? Are the whole of them meant to hang together ? 
Where does euphuistic compliment end and passion begin ? 
Who were the persons mentioned, including the brother- 
poet ? Which of the thousands of variant readings are 
correct ? What is the correct order ? And even — though 
this is not commonly put — do we possess the whole of them ? 
****** 
Mr. Pooler is an editor of the cautious and judicious type. 
His qfotes on the text — interpretations, variants, parallel 
paissage — embody a great deal of what is valuable in the 
work of his predecessors, and much, uniformly sensible, that 
is his own. On more general questions, however, he inclines 
to summarise the arguments of two centuries of commentators 
instead of parading theories of his own. One positive and 
exhaustive argument he does carry through, as I tliink, 
successfully. He argues, as against Sir Sidney Lee, that 
Benson for his edition of 1640 had no other materials than 
Thorpe's 1609 edition and The Passionate Pilgrim (1599), 
which contains two sonnets. Prima facie, there is a good 
deal in favour of Sir Sidney Lee's view : Benson leaves out 
some sonnets, misdescribes many in head-lines, muddles 
them up with other poems, and frequently varies tlie text. 
But most of his exploits can be explained away as the stupidi- 
ties of a dolt or the deliberate changes of a knave. Premising 
that "one blind beast may avoid the hole into which another 
blind beast has fallen, but it cannot fall into the same hole 
unless it is going over the same ground," Mr. Pooler collects 
a very large number of instances to show that, where Thorpe 
had committed misprints or errors of punctuation which 
play havoc with the sense, Benson corvtinually follows him. 
This is not what is called a "mere" bibhographical question. 
For in Benson's edition, to put it briefly, a great many of the 
"he's" are altered into "she's," and if it could be proved to 
be anything more than a mere adaptation of Thorpe's, the 
sex of the person addressed in most of the Sonnets would 
be more open to doubt than it is. 
* ' * * * * « 
The theory that the Sonnets do not refer to actual occur- 
rences, often propounded (and recently, supported, by the 
way, by Mr. Asquith). does not seem to me tenable ; I do 
not think that a poet whose own personal feelings were not 
directly engaged ever produced sonnets with the ring that 
these have. There is no justification, on the face of the 
poet's statements or in the general spirit which permeates 
the sonnets, for those interpreters who, sometimes from 
interested motives, have detected abnormality in Shake- 
speare's love for that friend of whom he said : 
And for a woman wert thou first created 
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, iell a-doting, 
And by addition me of thee defeated. . . . 
But ill' existed ; Shakespeare urged iiim constantly to marry ; 
and there was a breach. In spite of all the fever of all the 
controversialists, we do not know who he was. We do not 
even know whether his initials were W. H. ; Sir Sidney Lee 
thinks that " W. H." was a seedy hanger-on of the publishing 
trade. Whether the "Dark Lady" has ever been identified 
with Anne Hathaway, Mr. Pooler does not say, and I do not 
know. But there are several candidates for her post, and at 
least six for that of the "rival poet." The amount of inci- 
dental information brought to light by all their supporters 
has been enormous ; even Baconian research has a silver 
lining. But nothing near proof has ever been produced. 
The "Dark Lady" remains in the dark, and under " W. H.'s" 
dedication, as under Junius' title, the motto "Stat nominis 
umbra" must still be written. 
****** 
Possibly the mystery will never be solved. But even if it 
were, a greaterjnystery remains, and one that envelopes the 
Plays as well as the Sonnets. It is the greatest of all Shake- 
spearean mysteries ; far greater than the mystery, so obsessing 
to the Baconians, of how "the drunken illiterate clown of 
Stratford" could have known so much law, grammar, and 
classical mythology. Why was the greatest of all poets so 
utterly careless about the perpetuation of his texts ; why 
did he apparently take no steps to get the bulk of his work 
published or even to correct the corrupt versions that did 
get published ? Why, in an age when everybody rushed 
into print, did he leave his manuscripts about to die or 
precariously survive like foundlings ? In any case, had he 
never said a word about his art himself, this would have 
been inexplicable, in the light of what we know of human 
nature and the nature of poets. But, apart from that, there 
is plenty of quite indisputable detailed evidence that he 
who envied "this man's art and that man's scope," and who 
spoke of the "proud full sail" of a rival's "great verse" 
revered his own 'calling. More, over and over again, in the 
Sonnets themselves he not only shows that consciousness of 
his own powers which great poets always have but definitely 
anticipates the durability of what he has written. He never 
says that he is writing for his private amusement or relief 
and that he does not care what becomes of his work or whether 
anyone ever reads it : though that is the attitude that some 
critics, anxious not to admit any puzzle insoluble, have 
absurdly imputed to him. W^at he says is : 
Not marble, nor th^ gilded monuments 
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme ; 
But you shall shine more bright in these contents 
Than unswept stone, besmear'd with sluttish time : 
When wasteful war shall statues overturn. 
And broils root out the work of masonry, 
Nor Mars his sword fior War's quick fire shall burn 
The living record of your memory. 
'Gainst death and all obUvious 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. 
" Who will believe my verse in time to come ? " he asks again. 
"Do thy most,, old Time," he says. "My love shall in my 
verse ever live long." ''To times in hope my verse shall 
stand. Praising thy worth" : 
Your njonnment shall be my gentle verse. 
Which eyes not yet created shall o'er read ; 
And tongues to be your being shall rehearse, 
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. 
And where he is not promising, but hoping, we see the con- 
fidence behind the hope, as in that sonnet with the marvellous 
beginning : 
Since brass nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea, 
But sad mortality o'ersways their power, 
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea. 
Whose action is no stronger than a flower. 
He had written in some of these sonnets the greatest lyric 
verse in the world, and he knew it ; verse which in its effort- 
less fertility of image, its "inevitable" directness of phrase, 
its perfection of rhythm, must be the idol and the despair 
of every writer who reads it and sees Shakespeare doing a 
thousand times "on his liead" what he himself would be 
proud to do once. There are contorted sonnets ; there are 
oven dull ones ; but the best, and the best jiarts of the others 
surpass anything in English poetry. And they were, appar- 
ently, the by-product of a voluminous professional 
dramatist. 
