The Portrait of Mr. W. H. (Expanded Version): Chapter IV

It was not for some weeks after I had begun my study of the subject that I ventured to approach the curious group of Sonnets (CXXVII–CLII) that deal with the dark woman who, like a shadow or thing of evil omen, came across Shakespeare’s great romance, and for a season stood between him and Willie Hughes. They were obviously printed out of their proper place and should have been inserted between Sonnets XXXIII and XL. Psychological and artistic reasons necessitated this change, a change which I hope will be adopted by all future editors, as without it an entirely false impression is conveyed of the nature and final issue of this noble friendship.

Who was she, this black-browed, olive-skinned woman, with her amorous mouth “that Love’s own hand did make,” her “cruel eye,” and her “foul pride,” her strange skill on the virginals and her false, fascinating nature? An over-curious scholar of our day had seen in her a symbol of the Catholic Church, of that Bride of Christ who is “black but comely.” Professor Minto, following in the footsteps of Henry Brown, had regarded the whole group of Sonnets as simply “exercises of skill undertaken in a spirit of wanton defiance and derision of the commonplace.” Mr Gerald Massey, without any historical proof or probability, had insisted that they were addressed to the celebrated Lady Rich, the Stella of Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnets, the Philoclea of his “Arcadia,” and that they contained no personal revelation of Shakespeare’s life and love, having been written in Lord Pembroke’s name and at his request. Mr Tyler had suggested that they referred to one of Queen Elizabeth’s maids-of-honour, by name Mary Fitton. But none of these explanations satisfied the conditions of the problem. The woman that came between Shakespeare and Willie Hughes was a real woman, black-haired, and married, and of evil repute. Lady Rich’s fame was evil enough, it is true, but her hair was of—

“fine threads of finest gold,In curled knots man’s thought to hold,”

and her shoulders like “white doves perching.” She was, as King James said to her lover, Lord Mountjoy, “a fair woman with a black soul.” As for Mary Fitton, we know that she was unmarried in 1601, the time when her amour with Lord Pembroke was discovered, and besides, any theories that connected Lord Pembroke with the Sonnets were, as Cyril Graham had shewn, put entirely out of court by the fact that Lord Pembroke did not come to London till they had been actually written and read by Shakespeare to his friends.

It was not, however, her name that interested me. I was content to hold with Professor Dowden that “To the eyes of no diver among the wrecks of time will that curious talisman gleam.” What I wanted to discover was the nature of her influence over Shakespeare, as well as the characteristics of her personality. Two things were certain: she was much older than the poet, and the fascination that she exercised over him was at first purely intellectual. He began by feeling no physical passion for her. “I do not love thee with mine eyes,” he says:

“Nor are mine ears with thy tongue’s tune delighted;Nor tender feeling to base touches prone,Nor taste, nor smell, desire to be invitedTo any sensual feast with thee alone.”

He did not even think her beautiful:

“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;Coral is far more red than her lips’ red:If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.”

He has his moments of loathing for her, for, not content with enslaving the soul of Shakespeare, she seems to have sought to snare the senses of Willie Hughes. Then Shakespeare cries aloud,—

“Two loves I have of comfort and despair,Which like two spirits do suggest me still:The better angel is a man right fair,The worser spirit a woman colour’d ill.To win me soon to hell, my female evilTempteth my better angel from my side,And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,Wooing his purity with her foul pride.”

Then he sees her as she really is, the “bay where all men ride,” the “wide world’s common place,” the woman who is in the “very refuse” of her evil deeds, and who is “as black as hell, as dark as night.” Then it is that he pens that great sonnet upon Lust (“Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame”), of which Mr Theodore Watts says rightly that it is the greatest sonnet ever written. And it is then, also, that he offers to mortgage his very life and genius to her if she will but restore to him that “sweetest friend” of whom she had robbed him.

To compass this end he abandons himself to her, feigns to be full of an absorbing and sensuous passion of possession, forges false words of love, lies to her, and tells her that he lies.

“My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are,At random from the truth vainly express’d;For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.”

Rather than suffer his friend to be treacherous to him, he will himself be treacherous to his friend. To shield his purity, he will himself be vile. He knew the weakness of the boy-actor’s nature, his susceptibility to praise, his inordinate love of admiration, and deliberately set himself to fascinate the woman who had come between them.

It is never with impunity that one’s lips say Love’s Litany. Words have their mystical power over the soul, and form can create the feeling from which it should have sprung. Sincerity itself, the ardent, momentary sincerity of the artist, is often the unconscious result of style, and in the case of those rare temperaments that are exquisitely susceptible to the influences of language, the use of certain phrases and modes of expression can stir the very pulse of passion, can send the red blood coursing through the veins, and can transform into a strange sensuous energy what in its origin had been mere æsthetic impulse, and desire of art. So, at least, it seems to have been with Shakespeare. He begins by pretending to love, wears a lover’s apparel and has a lover’s words upon his lips. What does it matter? It is only acting, only a comedy in real life. Suddenly he finds that what his tongue had spoken his soul had listened to, and that the raiment that he had put on for disguise is a plague-stricken and poisonous thing that eats into his flesh, and that he cannot throw away. Then comes Desire, with its many maladies, and Lust that makes one love all that one loathes, and Shame, with its ashen face and secret smile. He is enthralled by this dark woman, is for a season separated from his friend, and becomes the “vassal-wretch” of one whom he knows to be evil and perverse and unworthy of his love, as of the love of Willie Hughes. “O, from what power,” he says,—

“hast thou this powerful might,With insufficiency my heart to sway?To make me give the lie to my true sight,And swear that brightness does not grace the day?Whence hast thou this becoming of things ill,That in the very refuse of thy deedsThere is such strength and warrantise of skillThat, in my mind, thy worst all best exceeds?”

He is keenly conscious of his own degradation, and finally, realising that his genius is nothing to her compared to the physical beauty of the young actor, he cuts with a quick knife the bond that binds him to her, and in this bitter sonnet bids her farewell:—

“In loving thee thou know’st I am forsworn,But thou art twice forsworn, to me love swearing;In act thy bed-vow broke, and new faith torn,In vowing new hate after new love bearing.But why of two oaths’ breach do I accuse thee,When I break twenty? I am perjur’d most;For all my vows are oaths but to misuse thee,And all my honest faith in thee is lost:For I have sworn deep oaths of thy deep kindness,Oaths of thy love, thy truth, thy constancy;And, to enlighten thee, gave eyes to blindness,Or made them swear against the thing they see;For I have sworn thee fair; more perjur’d I,To swear against the truth so foul a lie!”

His attitude towards Willie Hughes in the whole matter shews at once the fervour and the self-abnegation of the great love he bore him. There is a poignant touch of pathos in the close of this sonnet:

“Those pretty wrongs that liberty commits,When I am sometime absent from thy heart,Thy beauty and thy years full well befits,For still temptation follows where thou art.Gentle thou art, and therefore to be won,Beauteous thou art, therefore to be assailed;And when a woman woos, what woman’s sonWill sourly leave her till she have prevailed?Ay me! but yet thou mightst my seat forbear,And chide thy beauty and thy straying youth,Who lead thee in their riot even thereWhere thou art forc’d to break a two-fold truth,—Hers, by thy beauty tempting her to thee,Thine, by thy beauty being false to me.”

But here he makes it manifest that his forgiveness was full and complete:

“No more be griev’d at that which thou hast done:Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud;Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.All men make faults, and even I in this,Authorising thy trespass with compare,Myself corrupting, salving thy amiss,Excusing thy sins more than thy sins are;For to thy sensual fault I bring in sense,—Thy adverse party is thy advocate,—And ’gainst myself a lawful plea commence:Such civil war is in my love and hate,That I an accessary needs must beTo that sweet thief which sourly robs from me.”

Shortly afterwards Shakespeare left London for Stratford (Sonnets XLIII–LII), and when he returned Willie Hughes seems to have grown tired of the woman who for a little time had fascinated him. Her name is never mentioned again in the Sonnets, nor is there any allusion made to her. She had passed out of their lives.

But who was she? And, even if her name has not come down to us, were there any allusions to her in contemporary literature? It seems to me that although better educated than most of the women of her time, she was not nobly born, but was probably the profligate wife of some old and wealthy citizen. We know that women of this class, which was then first rising into social prominence, were strangely fascinated by the new art of stage playing. They were to be found almost every afternoon at the theatre, when dramatic performances were being given, and “The Actors’ Remonstrance” is eloquent on the subject of their amours with the young actors.

Cranley in his “Amanda” tells us of one who loved to mimic the actor’s disguises, appearing one day “embroidered, laced, perfumed, in glittering show . . . as brave as any Countess,” and the next day, “all in mourning, black and sad,” now in the grey cloak of a country wench, and now “in the neat habit of a citizen.” She was a curious woman, “more changeable and wavering than the moon,” and the books that she loved to read were Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis,” Beaumont’s “Salmacis and Hermaphroditus,” amorous pamphlets, and “songs of love and sonnets exquisite.” These sonnets, that were to her the “bookes of her devotion,” were surely none other but Shakespeare’s own, for the whole description reads like the portrait of the woman who fell in love with Willie Hughes, and, lest we should have any doubt on the subject, Cranley, borrowing Shakespeare’s play on words, tells us that, in her “proteus-like strange shapes,” she is one who—

“Changes hews with the chameleon.”

Manningham’s Table-book, also, contains a clear allusion to the same story. Manningham was a student at the Middle Temple with Sir Thomas Overbury and Edmund Curle, whose chambers he seems to have shared; and his Diary is still preserved among the Harleian MSS. at the British Museum, a small duodecimo book written in a fair and tolerably legible hand, and containing many unpublished anecdotes about Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh, Spenser, Ben Jonson and others. The dates, which are inserted with much care, extend from January 1600–1 to April 1603, and under the heading “March 13, 1601,” Manningham tells us that he heard from a member of Shakespeare’s company that a certain citizen’s wife being at the Globe Theatre one afternoon, fell in love with one of the actors, and “grew so farre in liking with him, that before shee went from the play shee appointed him to come that night unto hir,” but that Shakespeare “overhearing their conclusion” anticipated his friend and came first to the lady’s house, “went before and was entertained,” as Manningham puts it, with some added looseness of speech which it is unnecessary to quote.

It seemed to me that we had here a common and distorted version of the story that is revealed to us in the Sonnets, the story of the dark woman’s love for Willie Hughes, and Shakespeare’s mad attempt to make her love him in his friend’s stead. It was not, of course, necessary to accept it as absolutely true in every detail. According to Manningham’s informant, for instance, the name of the actor in question was not Willie Hughes, but Richard Burbage. Tavern gossip, however, is proverbially inaccurate, and Burbage was, no doubt, dragged into the story to give point to the foolish jest about William the Conqueror and Richard the Third, with which the entry in Manningham’s Diary ends. Burbage was our first great tragic actor, but it needed all his genius to counterbalance the physical defects of low stature and corpulent figure under which he laboured, and he was not the sort of man who would have fascinated the dark woman of the Sonnets, or would have cared to be fascinated by her. There was no doubt that Willie Hughes was referred to, and the private diary of a young law student of the time thus curiously corroborated Cyril Graham’s wonderful guess at the secret of Shakespeare’s great romance. Indeed, when taken in conjunction with “Amanda,” Manningham’s Table-book seemed to me to be an extremely strong link in the chain of evidence, and to place the new interpretation of the Sonnets on something like a secure historic basis, the fact that Cranley’s poem was not published till after Shakespeare’s death being really rather in favour of this view, as it was not likely that he would have ventured during the lifetime of the great dramatist to revive the memory of this tragic and bitter story.

This passion for the dark lady also enabled me to fix with still greater certainty the date of the Sonnets. From internal evidence, from the characteristics of language, style, and the like, it was evident that they belonged to Shakespeare’s early period, the period of “Love’s Labour’s Lost” and “Venus and Adonis.” With the play, indeed, they are intimately connected. They display the same delicate euphuism, the same delight in fanciful phrase and curious expression, the artistic wilfulness and studied graces of the same “fair tongue, conceit’s expositor.” Rosaline, the—

“whitely wanton with a velvet brow,With two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes,”

who is born “to make black fair,” and whose “favour turns the fashion of the days,” is the dark lady of the Sonnets who makes black “beauty’s successive heir.” In the comedy as well as in the poems we have that half-sensuous philosophy that exalts the judgment of the senses “above all slower, more toilsome means of knowledge,” and Berowne is perhaps, as Mr Pater suggests, a reflex of Shakespeare himself “when he has just become able to stand aside from and estimate the first period of his poetry.”

Now though “Love’s Labour’s Lost” was not published till 1598, when it was brought out “newlie corrected and augmented” by Cuthbert Burby, there is no doubt that it was written and produced on the stage at a much earlier date, probably, as Professor Dowden points out, in 1588–9. If this be so, it is clear that Shakespeare’s first meeting with Willie Hughes must have been in 1585, and it is just possible that this young actor may, after all, have been in his boyhood the musician of Lord Essex.

It is clear, at any rate, that Shakespeare’s love for the dark lady must have passed away before 1594. In this year there appeared, under the editorship of Hadrian Dorell, that fascinating poem, or series of poems, “Willobie his Avisa,” which is described by Mr Swinburne as the one contemporary book which has been supposed to throw any direct or indirect light on the mystic matter of the Sonnets. In it we learn how a young gentleman of St. John’s College, Oxford, by name Henry Willobie, fell in love with a woman so “fair and chaste” that he called her Avisa, either because such beauty as hers had never been seen, or because she fled like a bird from the snare of his passion, and spread her wings for flight when he ventured but to touch her hand. Anxious to win his mistress he consults his familiar friend W. S., “who not long before had tried the curtesy of the like passion, and was now newly recovered of the like infection.” Shakespeare encourages him in the siege that he is laying to the Castle of Beauty, telling him that every woman is to be wooed, and every woman to be won; views this “loving comedy” from far off, in order to see “whether it would sort to a happier end for this new actor than it did for the old player,” and “enlargeth the wound with the sharpe razor of a willing conceit,” feeling the purely æsthetic interest of the artist in the moods and emotions of others. It is unnecessary, however, to enter more fully into this curious passage in Shakespeare’s life, as all that I wanted to point out was that in 1594 he had been cured of his infatuation for the dark lady, and had already been acquainted for at least three years with Willie Hughes.

My whole scheme of the Sonnets was now complete, and, by placing those that refer to the dark lady in their proper order and position, I saw the perfect unity and completeness of the whole. The drama—for indeed they formed a drama and a soul’s tragedy of fiery passion and of noble thought—is divided into four scenes or acts. In the first of these (Sonnets I–XXXII) Shakespeare invites Willie Hughes to go upon the stage as an actor, and to put to the service of Art his wonderful physical beauty, and his exquisite grace of youth, before passion has robbed him of the one, and time taken from him the other. Willie Hughes, after a time, consents to be a player in Shakespeare’s company, and soon becomes the very centre and keynote of his inspiration. Suddenly, in one red-rose July (Sonnets XXXIII–LII, LXI, and CXXVII–CLII) there comes to the Globe Theatre a dark woman with wonderful eyes, who falls passionately in love with Willie Hughes. Shakespeare, sick with the malady of jealousy, and made mad by many doubts and fears, tries to fascinate the woman who had come between him and his friend. The love, that is at first feigned, becomes real, and he finds himself enthralled and dominated by a woman whom he knows to be evil and unworthy. To her the genius of a man is as nothing compared to a boy’s beauty. Willie Hughes becomes for a time her slave and the toy of her fancy, and the second act ends with Shakespeare’s departure from London. In the third act her influence has passed away. Shakespeare returns to London, and renews his friendship with Willie Hughes, to whom he promises immortality in his plays. Marlowe, hearing of the wonder and grace of the young actor, lures him away from the Globe Theatre to play Gaveston in the tragedy of “Edward II,” and for the second time Shakespeare is separated from his friend. The last act (Sonnets C–CXXVI) tells us of the return of Willie Hughes to Shakespeare’s company. Evil rumour had now stained the white purity of his name, but Shakespeare’s love still endures and is perfect. Of the mystery of this love, and of the mystery of passion, we are told strange and marvellous things, and the Sonnets conclude with an envoi of twelve lines, whose motive is the triumph of Beauty over Time, and of Death over Beauty.

And what had been the end of him who had been so dear to the soul of Shakespeare, and who by his presence and passion had given reality to Shakespeare’s art? When the Civil War broke out, the English actors took the side of their king, and many of them, like Robinson foully slain by Major Harrison at the taking of Basing House, laid down their lives in the king’s service. Perhaps on the trampled heath of Marston, or on the bleak hills of Naseby, the dead body of Willie Hughes had been found by some of the rough peasants of the district, his gold hair “dabbled with blood,” and his breast pierced with many wounds. Or it may be that the Plague, which was very frequent in London at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and was indeed regarded by many of the Christians as a judgment sent on the city for its love of “vaine plaies and idolatrous shewes,” had touched the lad while he was acting, and he had crept home to his lodging to die there alone, Shakespeare being far away at Stratford, and those who had flocked in such numbers to see him, the “gazers” whom, as the Sonnets tell us, he had “led astray,” being too much afraid of contagion to come near him. A story of this kind was current at the time about a young actor, and was made much use of by the Puritans in their attempts to stifle the free development of the English Renaissance. Yet, surely, had this actor been Willie Hughes, tidings of his tragic death would have been speedily brought to Shakespeare as he lay dreaming under the mulberry tree in his garden at New Place, and in an elegy as sweet as that written by Milton on Edward King, he would have mourned for the lad who had brought such joy and sorrow into his life, and whose connection with his art had been of so vital and intimate a character. Something made me feel certain that Willie Hughes had survived Shakespeare, and had fulfilled in some measure the high prophecies the poet had made about him, and one evening the true secret of his end flashed across me.

He had been one of those English actors who in 1611, the year of Shakespeare’s retirement from the stage, went across sea to Germany and played before the great Duke Henry Julius of Brunswick, himself a dramatist of no mean order, and at the Court of that strange Elector of Brandenburg, who was so enamoured of beauty that he was said to have bought for his weight in amber the young son of a travelling Greek merchant, and to have given pageants in honour of his slave all through that dreadful famine year of 1606–7, when the people died of hunger in the very streets of the town, and for the space of seven months there was no rain. The Library at Cassel contains to the present day a copy of the first edition of Marlowe’s “Edward II,” the only copy in existence, Mr Bullen tells us. Who could have brought it to that town, but he who had created the part of the king’s minion, and for whom indeed it had been written? Those stained and yellow pages had once been touched by his white hands. We also know that “Romeo and Juliet,” a play specially connected with Willie Hughes, was brought out at Dresden in 1613, along with “Hamlet” and “King Lear,” and certain of Marlowe’s plays, and it was surely to none other than Willie Hughes himself that in 1617 the death-mask of Shakespeare was brought by one of the suite of the English ambassador, pale token of the passing away of the great poet who had so dearly loved him. Indeed there was something peculiarly fitting in the idea that the boy-actor, whose beauty had been so vital an element in the realism and romance of Shakespeare’s art, had been the first to have brought to Germany the seed of the new culture, and was in his way the precursor of the Aufklärung or Illumination of the eighteenth century, that splendid movement which, though begun by Lessing and Herder, and brought to its full and perfect issue by Goethe, was in no small part helped on by a young actor—Friedrich Schroeder—who awoke the popular consciousness, and by means of the feigned passions and mimetic methods of the stage showed the intimate, the vital, connection between life and literature. If this was so,—and there was certainly no evidence against it,—it was not improbable that Willie Hughes was one of those English comedians (mimi quidam ex Britannia, as the old chronicle calls them), who were slain at Nuremberg in a sudden uprising of the people, and were secretly buried in a little vineyard outside the city by some young men “who had found pleasure in their performances, and of whom some had sought to be instructed in the mysteries of the new art.” Certainly no more fitting place could there be for him to whom Shakespeare said “thou art all my art,” than this little vineyard outside the city walls. For was it not from the sorrows of Dionysos that Tragedy sprang? Was not the light laughter of Comedy, with its careless merriment and quick replies, first heard on the lips of the Sicilian vine-dressers? Nay, did not the purple and red stain of the wine-froth on face and limbs give the first suggestion of the charm and fascination of disguise?—the desire for self-concealment, the sense of the value of objectivity, thus showing itself in the rude beginnings of the art. At any rate, wherever he lay—whether in the little vineyard at the gate of the Gothic town, or in some dim London churchyard amidst the roar and bustle of our great city—no gorgeous monument marked his resting place. His true tomb, as Shakespeare saw, was the poet’s verse, his true monument the permanence of the drama. So had it been with others whose beauty had given a new creative impulse to their age. The ivory body of the Bithynian slave rots in the green ooze of the Nile, and on the yellow hills of the Cerameicus is strewn the dust of the young Athenian; but Antinous lives in sculpture, and Charmides in philosophy.