SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS The Problems Solved Books by A. L. Rowse THE ELIZABETHAN AGE The England of Elizabeth The Expansion of Elizabethan England The Elizabethan Renaissance: The Life of the Society The Elizabethan Renaissance: The Cultural Achievement William Shakespeare: A Biography Shakespeare's Sonnets (A modern text, and prose versions, introduction and notes) Christopher Marlowe: A Biography Shakespeare's Southampton: Patron of Virginia The Elizabethans and America Ralegh and the Throckmortons Sir Richard Grenville of the Revenge Tudor Cornwall The Cornish in America A Cornish Anthology Cornish Stories A Cornish Childhood A Cornishman at Oxford The Early Churchills The Later Churchills The Churchills The English Spirit (revised edition) Times, Persons, Places (The English Past) SOUTHAMPTON AT THE PERIOD OF THE SONNETS SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS THE PROBLEMS SOLVED A Modern Edition, with Prose Versions, Introduction and Notes by A. L. ROWSE SECOND EDITION Palgrave Macmillan © A. L. Rowse 1964, 1973 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission. First Edition February 1964 Reprinted October 1964 Second Edition 1973 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD London and Basingstoke Associated companies in New York Dublin Melbourne Johannesburg and Madras SBN 333 14733 2. (hard cover) 333 14734 0 (paper cover) ISBN 978-0-333-14734-4 ISBN 978-1-349-15502-6 (eBook) DOl 10.1007/978-1-349-15502-6 The paperback edition of this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent, in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and with out a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. CONTENTS Southampton at the period of the Sonnets frontispiece Introduction page ix The Sonnets I v To Geoffrey Hudson who has always understood in lifelong affection INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION I This Edition Hitherto the Sonnets of Shakespeare have been regarded as the greatest puzzle in English, possibly world, literature. Their prob lems have been thought to be insoluble, the questions they raise unanswerable. In default of answers, certain and valid, these poems - among the world's most famous and beautiful - have long provided ground for the wildest speculation. Even among scholars there has been no certainty, but utter confusion. Their very nature has been in dispute, some respectable scholars thinking them to have been mere literary exercises. They were, of course, autobiographical ; they would not have the power, the urgency and conviction they carry, if they had not been. They were autobiography before they became literature. They come straight from the heart, from the whole personality - as great literature does-of the world's best loved writer. Naturally, with a professional writer, they have here and there touches of literary exercise ; but, as a whole, they tell a story so strange that it could only have been experienced and true. It is the purpose of this edition to bring out the story, as none has been able to do, and to show that it is true. One cannot fully appreciate the Sonnets without reading them as a whole : no use reaching one down here or there and then hoping to grasp the situa tion and what one is being told. Yet that is what people usually do. The Sonnets were never written to create a puzzle - though the clue has been lost for centuries. They were written straight forwardly, directly, by one person for another-by a poet for his young patron, as we shall see - with an immediate and sincere impulse. Yet the story that is revealed, and has been concealed for so long, is highly dramatic and that of a poet who was already beginning to be well known as a dramatist. That is why they were not published at the time, like other sonnet-sequences ; they were not published till years after the story they relate was folded up, and then not by Shakespeare, but by a publisher who had got the manuscripts. They were too near the bone. This is where an historian is needed - though an historian with an equal feeling for literature. The textual scholar, Hyder Rollins, who gave us the fullest edition of the Sonnets in the New Variorum Shakespeare, saw that the indispensable clue to their interpretation was to get their dating right. 'The question when the Sonnets were written is in many respects the most important of all the unanswer able questions they pose. If it could be answered definitely and finally, there might be some chance of establishing to general satisfaction the identity of the friend, the rival poet (supposing that all were real individuals), and even of determining whether the order of the Quarto is the author's or not. In the past and at present such a solution has been and remains an idle dream.' Observe the total pessimism, the assumption that all these questions are unanswerable. 'The problems of Shakespeare's Sonnets are insoluble ; therefore they are insoluble' - that was the obtuse attitude I came up against in putting forward the correct answers, both in my biographies of Shakespeare, Marlowe and Southampton, as well as in my previous edition of the Sonnets. I never expected to find the answer to the most mysterious, the most tantalising and elusive problem oft hem all-the identity of Shake speare's mistress, the Dark Lady. Of course one would never find her by the reach-me-down method of throwing a name up in the air, hoping that it would settle in a preconceived slot - any more than one could settle the identity of' Mr. W. H.' that way. That way is no method at all ; all the books written that way have naturally not solved the problem but merely added to the confusion, a waste of time, so many mares' nests. As I have said all along, the proper method is an historical one : to take each poem one after the other, to follow it line by line, watching for every piece of internal information for its coherence with what is happening in the external world, checking for con sistency at every point, accumulating patiently every fact and what may legitimately be inferred, until the whole structure stands forth clear. I said originally that it would be found that the historian's account of the matter could not be impugned. Nor has it been. In fact, it has been triumphantly vindicated by the wholly unexpected discovery of the Dark Lady and who she was, along these lines in complete consistency with my previous findings. X