Who was the Rival Poet of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 86?


© Connotations, 8.1, 1998-9

 

[The present text is from a copy of the typescript received in 1999 from E.S.; for the final version with notes see the downloadable .pdf. I'm obliged to Dr. Uli Fries for the permission to reprint and the courtesy of a copy]

  

Many of Shakespeare’s sonnets are addressed to a patron. One of them, No 86, purports to be about a rival poet. Its text reads as follows, in the 1609 first edition:

 

Was it the proud full saile of his great verse,

Bound for the prize of (all to precious) you,

That did my ripe thoughts in my braine inhearce,

Making their tombe the wombe wherein they grew?

Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write,

Aboue a mortal pitch, that struck me dead?

No, neither he, nor his compiers by night

Giuing him ayde, my verse astonished.

He nor that affable familiar ghost

Which nightly gulls him with intelligence,

As victors of my silence cannot boast,

I was not sick of any feare from thence,

          But when your countinance filled up his line,

          Then lackt I matter, that infeebled mine.

 

    Shakespeare had only one known patron, namely Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, to whom Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece were lovingly dedicated in 1593 and 1594 respectively. So, unless anyone has any reason (and none has yet been offered) for inventing a second patron, Southampton suffices as the chief candidate for the homage recorded in the Sonnets also.

    Then the sequence would have started in 1590, when he was seventeen and the poet was twenty-six. The first seventeen sonnets implore the patron to start a family: 1590 was the year in which Southampton refused to marry the bride found for him by his foster-father Lard Burghley. So the first question is: had any other poet sought Southampton's support in the early or middle 1590s, the period when he was publicly acknowledged and acclaimed as the patron of William Shakespeare?

    History records only four such aspirants. George Peele paid courtly compliments to Southampton in The Honour of the Garter (1593) and in Anglorum Feriae (1595). Barnaby Barnes's volume of love-lyrics Parthenophil and Parthenophe (1593) contains several dedicatory sonnets, including one to Southampton. The same is true of Gervase Markham's epic narrative The Tragedy of Sir Richard Greville (1595). Thomas Nashe's prose satire The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) begins with a prose address to Southampton. Lastly, Nashe's undated manuscript poem The Choice of Valentines was accompanied by two dedicatory sonnets addressed to “the Lord S.”, who may well have been Southampton.

    Those are all the known relevant facts. So it is irrational to claim “Marlowe” or “Chapman” as the main rival described in Sonnet 86; he was either Peele, Barnes, Markham or Nashe. But which? The question is surely of some interest. Yet it cannot be resolved without drawing on the Sonnets as a textual source. Now, these are notoriously deep waters, navigable only by powerful aestheticians. Such strengths are as rare among editors as among ordinary readers; but we are all entitled to put an oar in. Of course Shakespeare may just be imagining things, as his expert commentators often claim; but so may they. In order to steer any course at all, we should - again in the American pragmatic or British empirical tradition - proceed on minimal assumptions and see how they work.

    One phrase in Sonnet 86 echoes Barnes, namely “when your countenance filled up his line”. Barnes's sonnet to Southampton includes the actual words “your countenance”. Thus Southampton's favour is solicited for the love-lyrics of Parthenopil and Parthenope, so “that with your countenance graced they may withstand” envy and criticism. The word “countenance” has indeed 'filled up' Barnes's line - to overflowing, since it adds an extra syllable.

    This congruence between the two sources suggests that Shakespeare's thirteenth line (which scans “countenance” correctly) means what it says. So we next have to ask what evidence exists for his earlier assertions in the same sonnet, about a poet taught by spirits to write above a mortal pitch, receiving aid from his compeers by night, and being nightly gulled with intelligence by an affable familiar ghost. Only an implacable pre-conviction could torture those words into confessing any connection with “Marlowe” or “Chapman”. Marlowe was dead to begin with, in 1593; and there is no record that Chapman's innocuous claim to have conversed with the spirit of Homer was made before 1609. Besides, their two candidatures cancel each other out. Above all, neither of them can be shown to have sought Southampton's favour at a time when he was Shakespeare's well-known patron.

    But Barnaby Barnes did, with a sonnet which has a line filled with Southampton’s countenance, and in 1593, when Venus and Adonis was published. Barnes, furthermore, was a notorious occultist. His intimate friend Wllliam Percy asks him, by name, in his ownSonnets to Coelia (1594): “What tell'st thou me, by spells thou hast won thy dear?” John Ford, who also knew Barnes well, writes in The Lover’s Melancholy, “If it be not Parthenophil, it is a spirit in his likeness”, while the villain Orgillus in Ford's The Broken Heart is asked “You have a spirit. Sir, have ye? a familiar/That posts i' the air for your intelligence?” - an obvious reference to Sonnet 86. Barnes had already publicly made comparable claims in his envoi to Parthenophil and Parthenophe. First, he says, he burned frankincense on an altar and kindled a fire of cypress-wood. Then he called on threefold Hecate, invocated the Furies, and despatched a black goat to bring Parthenope (Greek for virgin) naked to his side. Next, he made a libation of wine to the Furies, burnt brimstone, and cut rosemary with a brazen axe, to make magic boughs. All these rituals were observed at night.

    This diabolism should be taken seriously. In 1598 Barnes was rightly arraigned as a poisoner before the court of Star Chamber; he escaped justice only by flight. His later play The Devil's Charter, about a poisoner, dramatises the conjuration of spirits, from sources including the Heptameron of Petrus de Abano. This grimoire gives instructions about the appropriate robes, incense, incantations, magic diagrams, goatskin parchment, and other paraphernalia to be used in raising the apparitions that rule the hours and the seasons. They will then fulfil one's wishes and answer one's questions, as in Sonnet 86.

    No wonder that in Middleton's Black Book c. 1604 Satan addresses Barnes thus: “I am not a little proud, I can tell you, Barnaby, that you dance after my pipe so long”. A tobacco-pipe is ostensibly meant: but no doubt a smokescreen was still needed, so that all such allusions could be masked as mere licence in one sense or another. Every necromancer includes a romancer. The sensible Shakespeare remained unimpressed, as Sonnet 86 freely implies in its manifest ironies (and indeed as it says straight out, in the word “gulls”). He felt that his rival's pretensions to demonic inspiration were worthless - like the poetry it allegedly inspired. Despite this clear inference, modern commentators are sure that “great verse” in the first line of Sonnet 86 must correspond exactly with their own infallible evaluation of poetic merit, some 400 years later. But this ignores the famous fact that Shakespeare in the Sonnets calls himself “old”, “poor”, “ignorant”, “despised” and so forth, by contrast with his young, rich, well-educated and admired patron. So perhaps 'great' was also seen from his master's viewpoint? That proud full sail may merely mean windy over-inflation.

    Southampton himself, however, would have been predisposed to accept and encourage Barnes. They both hero-worshipped the Earl of Essex, under whose command they both served as soldiers. Further, Barnes was the son of the Bishop of Durham, and hence moved with ease in elevated social as well as literary circles, including Southampton' s own. He was thus a celebrity as well as a poet. He wrote commendatory sonnets or dedications to the Countess of Pembroke, Sir William Herbert, Lady Strange, Lady Bridget Manners and the Earls of Northumberland and Essex as well as Southampton; he was invoked, in praise or blame, by writers or orators as diverse as Thomas Bastard, Thomas Campion, Thomas Churchyard, Sir Edward Coke, John Florio (Southampton's Italian tutor), Sir John Harington, Gabriel Harvey, John Marston, Thomas Michelborne, Thomas Nashe and the publisher John Wolfe, as well as the sonneteer William Percy and the dramatists Thomas Middleton and John Ford. Barnes was thus a far more famous and exalted personality, and for far longer, than any other rival, whether evidenced (like Peele, Markham or Nashe) or not (like Marlowe or Chapman). In more recent times, Barnes has also been praised as a poet by Bullen, Dowden, Gosse, Saintsbury, Boas and C. S. Lewis. His phrase “adamantine chains” was good enough for Milton in Paradise Lost. His style has a colourful if pretentious music of its own, as in ‘that white lily leaf, with fringed borders/Of angels' gold, veiled the skies/Of mine heaven's hierarchy'. He was, furthermore. already an acclaimed artist and scholar In the early 1590s, when his verse was first published; thus Churchyard's Praise of Poetry (1595) names only three living English poets - Spenser, Daniel and (at the same level) “one Barnes that Petrarch's scholar is”.

     This quoted phrase accords well with Shakespeare's claim that Southampton's eyes had 'added feathers to the learned's wing' (Sonnet 78, line 7); having merit in the Earl's eyes would certainly have raised the Oxford-educated scholar Barnes to further heights of achievement and esteem. As Barnes says to Southampton in his own sonnet: "Vouchsafe... 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". Further, that same sonnet fulsomely praises Southampton’s eyes as ”those heavenly lamps that give the Muses light”. Shakespeare also says that a rival had not only praised Southampton's eyes (Sonnet 83. 13-14), but also mentioned his ”virtue” and admired his “beautie” (79. 9-10). Barnes’s sonnet mentions Southampton's virtue, three times, and admires his beauty. Further, Shakespeare is content to “crie Amen/To euery Himne that able spirit affords” (85.7): in other words, a rival sometimes refers to his own love-lyrics as hymns. Barnes twice refers to his love-lyrics as hymns - as indeed they were. Shakespeare describes that same rival as a “spirit” (ibid., and again in 80.2); as we have seen, Barnes was described as a spirit, by John Ford.

     There are many other evidential interconnections between Barnes and the Sonnets. Thus, long before any rival poet is mentioned, Shakespeare scornfully rejects ‘that Muse' which is “stirred by a painted beauty”, uses “heaven itself for ornament” and so forth, witha dozen specific comparisons (Sonnet 21.1-8) all of which occur in Barnaby Barnes. The Dark Lady Sonnet 130 is equally forthright about other poets' “false compare”. Commentators commonly quote parallels from Thomas Watson, a decade earlier; but almost all the over-effusive examples that so distressed Shakespeare are found in Barnaby Barnes, at the material time. That contemporary poet was famous for the “new-found methods and compounds strange”, typical of “the time”, that Shakespeare avowedly abjured (Sonnet 76.3-4). A rival also approved of painting, unlike Shakespeare (Sonnets 21.1, 67.5. 82.13, 83.1-2); Barnaby Barnes admired it as an enhancement of his inamorata's beauty.

    There is other clear evidence In Shakespeare's works that he had read Parthenophil and Parthenophe, perhaps in the copy that Barnes had presented to Southampton in 1593, with"dedícated words" (Sonnet 82.3.4), thus temporarily replacing Shakespeare as “thy Poet” (Sonnet 79.4.7). The contents of that volume, conversely, suggest that Barnes had seen some of Shakespeare's sonnets in manuscript, as well as Venus and Adonis. The allusions include “Master...Mistress”, “Charter...Bonds”, “hot June”, “devouring Time” and the over-deliberate word-play in “When Mars returned from war/Shaking his spear afar/Cupid beheld./At him, in jest, Mars shaked [sic] his spear!” The blatant puns and latent bawdry may well also have been intended as a pointed dig at Shakespeare.   

    Times and tastes change, but the nature of evidence stays the same. Shakespeare's deference to his rival presents no difficulty; his Sonnets are habitually self-abnegatory. Their young patron was his sun and god; Venus and Adonis is ascribed to him by name and (in its Latin epigraph) to the sun-god Apollo. He had only to countenance Barnes for the latter tobe hailed as the wielder of a “goulden quill”, the writer of “good words” and the compiler of many a “precious phrase by all the Muses fil'd” (85.3-5); Barnes compares his sweetheart to all the Muses, by name, one after the other.

    But Shakespeare reserves his position vis-à-vis that “proud full sail”. “My saucy bark, inferior far to his/He of tall building, and of goodly pride” (Sonnet 80.7) nevertheless won the combat. It was the smaller vessels that had famously outmanoeuvred the great galleons of the Spanish Armada in 1588, only a few years earlier. Both “proud” and “pride” (also In Sonnet 75.1) presaged a fall; who now remembers Barnaby Barnes? But of course he could have been the main rival poet, on merit; and on the facts, he was. He and Shakespeare together are thus the pair described as “both your Poets” (Sonnet 83.14).

    This conclusion in turn confirms Southampton as the patron of the Sonnets, and the early 1590s as the period when his patronage was sought by others. Shakespeare reacts to that general rivalry by “doubting the filching age will steal his treasure” (Sonnet 75.6) and complaining that “euery Alien pen hath got my use/And under thee their poesie disperse” (Sonnet 78.3-4). Their compliments include crude flattery, or “gross painting” (Sonnet 82.13) in their “comments of your praise” (Sonnet 85.2): nevertheless young Southampton is typically extenuated as being “forced to seeke anew/Some fresher stamp of the time bettering days” (Sonnet 82.7-8). Barnes was indeed far fresher, i.e. years younger, than Shakespeare and all the other rivals, whether evidenced or putative. He was born in 1571 [For this fact, and many others, this essay is indebted to the well-researched chapter on Barnaby Barnes by Mark Eccles in Thomas Lodge and other Elizabethans (Harvard University Press, 1933)] and died in 1649, the year when the Sonnets were published. He may never have known that they rated him as a rival. But they portray his features among, other good likenesses of real people in actual circumstances. The Sonnets, therefore, areprima facie biographical. So why not attribute all their utterances to Shakespeare, in the first instance, and not to an imaginary “speaker”?