by Oscar Wilde
To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand:
Pity me, then, and wish I were renewed’ –
and there are many signs of the same feeling elsewhere, signs familiar to all real students of Shakespeare.
One point puzzled me immensely as I read the Sonnets, and it was days before I struck on the true interpretation, which indeed Cyril Graham himself seemed to have missed. I could not understand how it was that Shakespeare set so high a value on his young friend marrying. He himself had married young and the result had been unhappiness, and it was not likely that he would have asked Willie Hughes to commit the same error. The boy-player of Rosalind had nothing to gain from marriage, or from the passions of real life. The early sonnets with their strange entreaties to have children seemed to be a jarring note.
The explanation of the mystery came on me quite suddenly, and I found it in the curious dedication. It will be remembered that this dedication was as follows: –
‘TO. THE. ONLIE . BEGETTER . OF . THESE . INSUING . SONNETS . MR . W . H . ALL . HAPPINESSE . AND . THAT . ETERNITIE . PROMISED . BY . OUR . EVER-LIVING . POET . WISHETH . THE . WELL-WISHING . ADVENTURER . IN . SETTING . FORTH
T.T.’
Some scholars have supposed that the word ‘begetter’ here means simply the procurer of the Sonnets for Thomas Thorpe the publisher; but this view is now generally abandoned, and the highest authorities are quite agreed that it is to be taken in the sense of inspirer, the metaphor being drawn from the analogy of physical life. Now I saw that the same metaphor was used by Shakespeare himself all through the poems, and this set me on the right track. Finally I made my great discovery. The marriage that Shakespeare proposes for Willie Hughes is the ‘marriage with his Muse,’ an expression which is definitely put forward in Sonnet LXXXII where, in the bitterness of his heart at the defection of the boy-actor for whom he had written his greatest parts, and whose beauty had indeed suggested them, he opens his complaint by saying –
‘I grant thou wert not married to my Muse.’
The children he begs him to beget are no children of flesh and blood, but more immortal children of undying fame. The whole cycle of the early sonnets is simply Shakespeare’s invitation to Willie Hughes to go upon the stage and become a player. How barren and profitless a thing, he says, is this beauty of yours if it be not used: –
‘When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,
Thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now,
Will be a tattered weed, of small worth held:
Then being asked where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,
To say, within thine own deep-sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.’
You must create something in art: my verse ‘is thine and born of thee’; only listen to me and, I will
‘bring forth eternal numbers to outlive long date,’
and you shall people with forms of your own image the imaginary world of the stage. These children that you beget, he continues, will not wither away, as mortal children do, but you shall live in them and in my plays: do but –
‘Make thee another self, for love of me,
That beauty still may live in thine or thee!’
Be not afraid to surrender your personality, to give your ‘semblance to some other’:
‘To give away yourself keeps yourself still,
And you must live, drawn by your own sweet skill.’
I may not be learned in astrology, and yet, in those ‘constant stars’ your eyes,
‘I read such art
As truth and beauty shall together thrive,
If from thyself to store thou wouldst convert.’
What does it matter about others?
‘Let those whom Nature hath not made for store,
Harsh, featureless, and rude, barrenly perish’:
With you it is different, Nature –
‘carv’d thee for her seal, and meant thereby
Thou shouldst print more, nor let that copy die.’
Remember, too, how soon Beauty forsakes itself. Its action is no stronger than a flower, and like a flower it lives and dies. Think of ‘the stormy gusts of winter’s day,’ of the ‘barren edge of Death’s eternal cold,’ and –
‘ere thou be distilled,
Make sweet some vial; treasure thou some place
With beauty’s treasure, ere it be self-killed.’
Why, even flowers do not altogether die. When roses wither,
‘Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made’:
and you who are ‘my rose’ should not pass away without leaving your form in Art. For Art has the very secret of joy.
‘Ten times thyself were happier than thou art,
If ten of thine ten times refigur’d thee.’
You do not require the ‘bastard signs of fair,’ the painted face, the fantastic disguises of other actors:
‘…the golden tresses of the dead,
The right of sepulchres,’
need not be shorn away for you. In you –
‘…those holy antique hours are seen,
Without all ornament, itself and true,
Making no summer of another’s green.’
All that is necessary is to ‘copy what in you is writ’; to place you on the stage as you are in actual life. All those ancient poets who have written of ‘ladies dead and lovely knights’ have been dreaming of such a one as you, and:
‘All their praises are but prophecies
Of this our time, all you prefiguring.’
For your beauty seems to belong to all ages and to all lands. Your shade comes to visit me at night, but, I want to look upon your ‘shadow’ in the living day, I want to see you upon the stage. Mere description of you will not suffice:
‘If I could write the beauty of your eyes,
And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would say, “This poet lies;
Such heavenly touches ne’er touched earthly faces.”’
It is necessary that ‘some child of yours,’ some artistic creation that embodies you, and to which your imagination gives life, shall present you to the world’s wondering eyes. Your own thoughts are your children, offspring of sense and spirit; give some expression to them, and you shall find –
‘Those children nursed, delivered from thy brain,’
My thoughts, also, are my ‘children.’ They are of your begetting and my brain is:
‘the womb wherein they grew.’
For this great friendship of ours is indeed a marriage, it is the ‘marriage of true minds.’
I collected together all the passages that seemed to me to corroborate this view, and they produced a strong impression on me, and showed me how complete Cyril Graham’s theory really was. I also saw that it was quite easy to separate those lines in which Shakespeare speaks of the Sonnets themselves from those in which he speaks of his great dramatic work. This was a point that had been entirely overlooked by all the critics up to Cyril Graham’s day. And yet it was one of the most important in the whole series of poems. To the Sonnets Shakespeare was more or less indifferent. He did not wish to rest his fame on them. They were to him his ‘slight Muse,’ as he calls them, and intended, as Meres tells us, for private circulation only among a few, a very few, friends. Upon the other hand he was extremely conscious of the high artistic value of his plays, and shows a noble self-reliance upon his dramatic genius. When he says to Willie Hughes:
‘But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee’; –
the expression ‘eternal lines’ clearly alludes to o
ne of his plays that he was sending him at the time, just as the concluding couplet points to his confidence in the probability of his plays being always acted. In his address to the Dramatic Muse (Sonnets C and CI) we find the same feeling.
‘Where art thou, Muse, that thou forget’st so long
To speak of that which gives thee all thy might?
Spend’st thou thy fury on some worthless song,
Darkening thy power to lend base subjects light?’
he cries, and he then proceeds to reproach the mistress of Tragedy and Comedy for her ‘neglect of truth in beauty dyed,’ and says:
‘Because he needs no praise, wilt thou be dumb?
Excuse not silence so; for ’t lies in thee
To make him much outlive a gilded tomb,
And to be praised of ages yet to be.
Then do thy office, Muse, I teach thee how,
To make him seem long hence as he shows now.’
It is, however, perhaps in Sonnet LV that Shakespeare gives to this idea its fullest expression. To imagine that the ‘powerful rhyme’ of the second line refers to the sonnet itself was entirely to mistake Shakespeare’s meaning. It seemed to me that it was extremely likely, from the general character of the sonnet, that a particular play was meant, and that the play was none other but Romeo and Juliet.
‘Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
That unswept stone besmeared with sluttish time.
When wasteful wars shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Not Mars his sword not war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory
‘Gainst death and all-oblivious 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.’
It was also very suggestive to note how here as elsewhere Shakespeare promised Willie Hughes immortality in a form that appealed to men’s eyes – that is to say, in a spectacular form, in a play that is to be looked at.
For two weeks I worked hard at the Sonnets, hardly ever going out, and refusing all invitations. Every day I seemed to be discovering something new, and Willie Hughes became to me a kind of spiritual presence, an ever-dominant personality. I could almost fancy that I saw him standing in the shadow of my room, so well had Shakespeare drawn him, with his golden hair, his tender flower-like grace, his dreamy deep-sunken eyes, his delicate mobile limbs, and his white lily hands. His very name fascinated me. Willie Hughes! Willie Hughes! How musically it sounded! Yes; who else but he could have been the master-mistress of Shakespeare’s passion, the lord of his love to whom he was bound in vassalage, the delicate minion of pleasure, the rose of the whole world, the herald of the spring decked in the proud livery of youth, the lovely boy whom it was sweet music to hear, and whose beauty was the very raiment of Shakespeare’s heart, as it was the keystone of his dramatic power? How bitter now seemed the whole tragedy of his desertion and his shame! – shame that he made sweet and lovely by the mere magic of his personality, but that was none the less shame. Yet as Shakespeare forgave him, should not we forgive him also? I did not care to pry into the mystery of his sin or of the sin, if such it was, of the great poet who had so dearly loved him. ‘I am that I am,’ said Shakespeare in a sonnet of noble scorn, –
‘I am that I am, and they that level
At my abuses reckon up their own;
I may be straight, though they themselves be bevel;
By their rank thoughts my deeds must not be shown.’
Willie Hughes’s abandonment of Shakespeare’s theatre was a different matter, and I investigated it at great length. Finally I came to the conclusion that Cyril Graham had been wrong in regarding the rival dramatist of Sonnet LXXX as Chapman. It was obviously Marlowe who was alluded to. At the time the Sonnets were written, which must have been between 1590 and 1595, such an expression as ‘the proud full sail of his great verse’ could not possibly have been used of Chapman’s work, however applicable it might have been to the style of his later Jacobean plays. No; Marlowe was clearly the rival poet of whom Shakespeare spoke in such laudatory terms; the hymn he wrote in Willie Hughes’ honour was the unfinished ‘Hero and Leander,’ and that
‘Affable familiar ghost
which nightly gulls him with intelligence,’
was the Mephistophiles of his Doctor Faustus. No doubt, Marlowe was fascinated by the beauty and grace of the boy-actor, and lured him away from the Blackfriars Theatre, that he might play the Gaveston of his Edward II. That Shakespeare had some legal right to retain Willie Hughes in his own company seems evident from Sonnet LXXXVII, where he says:
‘Farewell! thou are too dear for my possessing,
And like enough thou know’st thy estimate:
The charter of thy worth gives thee releasing;
My bonds in thee are all determinate.
For how do I hold thee but by thy granting?
And for that riches where is my deserving?
The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting,
And so my patent back again is swerving
Thyself thou gav’st, thy own worth then not knowing,
Or me, to whom thou gav’st it, else mistaking;
So they great gift, upon misprision growing,
Comes home again, on better judgment making.
Thus have I had thee, as a dream doth flatter,
In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.’
But whom he could not hold by love, he would not hold by force. Willie Hughes became a member of Lord Pembroke’s company, and perhaps in the open yard of the Red Bull Tavern, played the part of King Edward’s delicate minion. On Marlowe’s death, he seems to have returned to Shakespeare, who, whatever his fellow-partners may have thought of the matter, was not slow to forgive the wilfulness and treachery of the young actor.
How well, too, had Shakespeare drawn the temperament of the stage-player! Willie Hughes was one of those –
‘That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone.’
He could act love, but could not feel it, could mimic passion without realising it.
‘In many’s looks the false heart’s history
Is writ in moods and frowns and wrinkles strange,’
but with Willie Hughes it was not so. ‘Heaven,’ says Shakespeare, in a sonnet of mad idolatry –
‘Heaven in thy creation did decree
That in thy face sweet love should ever dwell;
Whate’er thy thoughts or thy heart’s workings be,
Thy looks should nothing thence but sweetness tell.’
In his ‘inconstant mind’ and his ‘false heart’ it was easy to recognise the insincerity and treachery that somehow seem inseparable from the artistic nature, as in his love of praise, that desire for immediate recognition that characterises all actors. And yet, more fortunate in this than other actors, Willie Hughes was to know something of immortality. Intimately connected with Shakespeare’s plays, he was to live in them, and by their production.
‘Your name from hence immortal life shall have,
Though I, once gone, to all the world must die:
The earth can yield me but a common grave,
When you entombed in men’s eyes shall lie.
Your monument 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.’
Nash with his venomous tongue had railed against Shakespeare for ‘reposing eternity in the mouth of a player,’ the reference being obvious
ly to the Sonnets.
But to Shakespeare, the actor was a deliberate and self-conscious fellow worker who gave form and substance to a poet’s fancy, and brought into Drama the elements of a noble realism. His silence could be as eloquent as words, and his gestures as expressive, and in those terrible moments of Titan agony or of god-like pain, when thought outstrips utterance, when the soul sick with excess of anguish stammers or is dumb, and the very raiment of speech is rent and torn by passion in its storm, then the actor could become, though it were but for a moment, a creative artist, and touch by his mere presence and personality those springs of terror and of pity to which tragedy appeals. This full recognition of the actor’s art, and of the actor’s power, was one of the things that distinguished the Romantic from the Classical Drama, and one of the things, consequently, that we owed to Shakespeare, who, fortunate in much, was fortunate also in this, that he was able to find Richard Burbage and to fashion Willie Hughes.
With what pleasure he dwelt upon Willie Hughes’ influence over his audience – the ‘gazers’ as he calls them; with what charm of fancy did he analyse the whole art! Even in the ‘Lover’s Complaint’ he speaks of his acting, and tells us that he was a nature so impressionable to the quality of dramatic situations that he could assume ‘all strange forms’ –
‘Of burning blushes, or of weeping water,
Or swooning paleness’:
explaining his meaning more fully later on where he tells us how Willie Hughes was able to deceive others by his wonderful power to –
‘Blush at speeches rank, to weep at woes,
Or to turn white and swoon at tragic shows.’
It had never been pointed out before that the shepherd of this lovely pastoral, whose ‘youth in art and art in youth’ are described with such subtlety of phrase and passion, was none other than the Mr. W. H. of the Sonnets. And yet there was no doubt that he was so. Not merely in personal appearance are the two lads the same, but their natures and temperaments are identical. When the false shepherd whispers to the fickle maid –
