Complete works of samuel.., p.386
Complete Works of Samuel Butler, page 386
It seems, then, that Mr Chalmers has first tampered with plain words, and then with the authorities to whom he appeals in order to show that he had not been tampering.
It is especially incumbent upon me to demolish Mr Chalmers’s interpretation of “begetter” inasmuch as to do so kills two birds with one stone; indeed I should say three, only that the third bird — Mr Chalmers’s own theory — is so dead that there is no killing it. The two birds that a reasonable interpretation of “begetter” will kill, are the theory that the Sonnets were most of them addressed to Lord Southampton, and that other even more fatuous supposition, that they were not, or, at any rate not many of them, addressed to or inspired by any one at all. Both these theories are very much alive at the present time. It is obvious, however, that what few and poor pleas for existence either of them can urge may be disallowed at once unless their upholders can make a good case in the outset for setting aside the prima facie interpretation of Thorpe’s preface.
I shall waive this point presently and consider what pleas can he urged without regard to the fact that I believe them to have been effectually barred by the words of Thorpe’s preface; but for the present I will harp a little longer on the meaning of the word “begetter.”
Doubtless the word “beget” is only “get” with a prefix added, and hence, doubtless, its earliest sense was the same as that of “get.” Murray gives “to get, to acquire,” as the primary meaning of the word, but the only use of “beget” in this sense which he adduces within a couple of hundred years of Shakespeare’s time, is one from Shakespeare himself, to wit, “Yon must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.” Surely, however, Shakespeare meant “You must acquire temperance, aye, and so assimilate it that you may beget it in your speech, and give smoothness to the very torrent of your passion.” It is inconceivable that he should have intended his “beget” in this passage to have no further significance than that of the word that he had just used — as though he had written “You must acquire and acquire a temperance, &c.” Murray’s case, therefore, is not in point.
As for the substantive “begetter,” Dr Murray says that it means, “the agent that originates, produces, or occasions,” and he quotes Thorpe’s preface to the Sonnets; but whether he meant that Mr W. H. was “the agent that originated” the Sonnets, or “that occasioned them,” in which case he is on the side of Malone, or “the agent that produced the Sonnets,” in which case he may or may not he on the side of Mr Chalmers and Boswell, I must leave it to the reader to determine. The other three examples of the use of the word which he adduces are incontestably in support of the view that “begetter” means “engenderer.”
Boswell, indeed, has trumped up a passage which he pretends bears out his view, though he must have very well known that it cannot equitably be made to do so. In a note on Thorpe’s dedicatory address in his 1821 edition of Malone he writes: —
The legetter is merely the person who gets or procures a thing, with the common prefix be added to it. So in Decker’s Satiromastix: “I have some cousin-germans at Court shall beget you the reversion of master of the king’s revels.” W. H. was probably one of the friends to whom Shakespeare’s sug’red Sonnets, as they are termed by Meres, had been communicated, and who furnished the printer with his copy.
Struck with the fact that Dr Murray has not cited the foregoing passage from Dekker, and has adduced no later example of “beget” being used as “get” or “gain,” than one from Gower in 1393 — struck also with the fact that Mr Sidney Lee, for whom it is a sine qua non that “begetter” should be misinterpreted, appealed to Dekker in his article on Shakespeare in the “Dictionary of National Biography,” but has not done so in his “Life of W. Shakespeare,” I turned to Dekker’s Satiromastix, and find that the passage in question is put into the month of Sir Bees Ap Vaughan, a Welshman, who by way of humour is represented as murdering the English language all through the piece; I then understood why Dr Murray did not refer to it and why Mr Sidney Lee desisted from doing so; but I did not and do not understand how Boswell could have adduced it, unless in the hope of hoodwinking unwary readers, who he knew would accept his statement without verifying it. This single factitious example has done duty with Southamptonites and impersonalites for the last 80 years, without anyone’s having been able to cap it with another. With the metaphorical use of the word we are, of course, all familiar — the use, indeed, is metaphorical in Thorpe’s preface — but the idea behind the metaphor is always that of engendering from within, not of procuring from without.
Canon Ainger, indeed, in the Athenaeum, Jan. 28, 1899, asks leave to “cite yet one more classical example of the use of ‘beget,’ in the sense of ‘procure,’” as though there were many such instances already familiar to well-read persons. He then quotes from The Critic a passage in which Mr Puff proposes to open his piece with the firing of a morning gun. This, Mr Puff declares, will at once “beget an awful attention in the audience.” Canon Ainger pretends to have failed to see — for I hold it more polite to suppose he is pretending — that “beget” in the passage just quoted is not used “in the sense of ‘procure,’” but of “engender.” The gun will not “procure” the required attention ah extra, and present it to the audience; it will breed the attention within them.
Another consideration of less weight, but one that so far as I know has not been noted, arises from the prefixing the word “only” to “begetter” in Thorpe’s preface. The fact that the Sonnets are so almost exclusively conversant, directly or indirectly, about a single person, suggests that they would all be in the hands of this person, whoever he may have been. There is nothing to support the view that copies were circulated in MS. We have Meres’ testimony to the fact that Shakespeare’s “private friends” had seen or heard more or fewer of his “sug’red sonnets” — doubtless the ones we have under consideration — but if copies had been going about in MS. they would have reached many another beyond the circle of Shakespeare’s private friends, and Jaggard would have been able to get hold of more than two of them for his Passionate-Pilgrim. There is no reason, then, for thinking that more than one person would have to be asked for the copy, and in this case, supposing “begetter” to mean nothing more than “procurer,” the addition of the word “only” appears too-emphatic for the occasion—” begetter” alone should have been ample. If on the other hand Mr W. H. was the only cause of the Sonnets having been written at all, the fact is one of sufficient interest and importance to make record reasonable even in a preface so tersely worded as the one in question. Again the word “only,” had, through the Creed, become so inseparably associated with “begotten,” that I cannot imagine any one’s using the words “only begetter” without intending the verb “beget” to mean metaphorically what it means in “only begotten.”
Lastly I should say a few words about Mr Chalmers’s attempt to make out that Thorpe’s preface is couched in extravagant language such as that of “Pistol, the ancient, and such affected persons,” and hence that the word “begetter” is to be taken in an unusual sense. I see Canon Ainger in his letter already referred to has endorsed this. He writes: —
I do not suppose that even Mr Lee would plead that the word “begetter” was a natural word for Thorpe to have used. But the whole style of the dedication is euphuistic — the vein of Armado or Osric — and the first thought of euphuists of that calibre was never to use a common word when an uncommon one would do.
I leave it to the reader to say whether he can find a single uncommon word, or a single word used in an uncommon sense, or a single sign of extravagance, in a preface which errs indeed deplorably on the side of conciseness, but in no other direction. Have we not here too, as in so much else that Mr Chalmers has written, all the criteria whereby we may detect men who are shaping, not theory by fact, but fact by theory?
Mr Chalmers and his followers have told equitable presumption to stand aside on no other ground than that of the exigencies of their own conjectures. Having formed their conjectures on insufficient grounds, they have taken them for granted; on the ground so laid they have built other conjectures; nor is it easy to say what further folly they will not commit unless they are effectually dealt with, for men’s eyes are being now focussed upon the Sonnets as they have never been focussed hitherto, and freedom from extravagance is not a virtue on which modern theorists can plume themselves.
The little that Mr Chalmers has to say about Tyrwhitt’s conjecture, approved by Malone, that “Hews,” in sonnet 20, is a play on Mr W. H.’s surname, will he found on pp. 53 — 63 of the Supplemental Apology. His remarks are intended to prove that sonnet 20 was addressed not to a man but to a woman — a supposition so absurd that it is not necessary to do more than refer the reader to Mr Chalmers himself.
CHAPTER V.
DR DRAKE AND THE LORD SOUTHAMPTON THEORY.
BUT it is not Mr Chalmers’s fatuousness that is so deplorable — it is the fatuousness of which he has been the cause in others, and which has vitiated more or less all that has been written about the Sonnets during the last hundred years. His two absurd books unsettled people’s minds, and even though it was obvious that the Sonnets were not addressed to Queen Elizabeth, his interpretation of “begetter” opened the door for supposing them to have been addressed to some more interesting person than a plain Mr W. H. whom nobody knew, or was likely to know. The same thing happened to the Sonnets after Mr Chalmers’s paradox, as happened to the Iliad and Odyssey after Wolf had started his multiple-authorship theory on its long and mischievous career: each successive would-be commentator must set out on a new wild-goose chase of his own. It seems as though sound criticism had something of the Prince Rupert’s drop about it — once injure it and it shivers into a thousand fragments.
It was some eighteen years before Mr Chalmers’s extravagance bore its due fruit, in the form of two large quartos each containing more than 600 pp., entitled “Shakspeare and his Times,” by Dr Nathan Drake, M.D. This work appeared in 1817, but its author tells us that he had been engaged upon it for several years — during which if he treated his patients with the recklessness with which he treated the Sonnets, he must have sent many a soul hurrying down to Hades.
Being about to maintain that the Sonnets were mainly addressed to Lord Southampton, he is of course compelled to adopt Mr Chalmers’s interpretation of “begetter.” I find I was wrong in my letter to the Athenaeum of Dec. 24, 1898, in Saying that he had not acknowledged his indebtedness. He has done so; he quotes, moreover, Mr Chalmers’s reference to Minsheu already given, but gives no more reason than that gentleman did for adopting an unusual instead of a usual meaning.
Dr Drake contends that Gildon must have agreed with him about the meaning of “begetter,” inasmuch as he has said that all the Sonnets were written in praise of Shakespeare’s Mistress.| There is no trace of any such saying in either of the editions of the Poems with which we can connect Gildon. Dr Drake must have been thinking of Lintott’s title-page. He appeals to Sewell as of the same opinion, on the score of a passage quoted on an earlier page of this book, from which it is plain that Sewell neither said nor thought what Dr Drake says he did, though wishing to appear to do so. He then implies that Mr Chalmers’s interpretation of “begetter” had been universally accepted until 1780, when it was first disturbed by Malone — the fact being, as I trust I have made sufficiently clear, that no one whose opinion is worth the paper it is written on had published anything or left us any opinion about the Sonnets. How far Dr Drake himself is competent to discuss the subject the following extract may suffice to show.
Dr Drake writes: —
“We may also very safely affirm of Shakspeare’s Sonnets, that if their style be compared with that of his predecessors and contemporaries, in the same department of poetry, a manifest superiority must often be awarded him, on the score of force, dignity, and simplicity of expression; qualities of which we shall very soon afford the reader some striking instances.
To a certain extent we must admit the charge of circumlocution, not as applied to individual sonnets, but to the subject on which the whole series is written. The obscurities of this species of poem have almost uniformly arisen from density and compression of style, nor are the compositions of Shakspeare more than usually free from this style of defect; but when it is considered that our author has written one hundred and twenty-six sonnets for the sole purpose of expressing his attachment to his patron, it must necessarily follow that a subject so reiterated would display no small share of circumlocution. Great ingenuity has been exhibited by the poet in varying his phraseology and ideas; but no effort could possibly obviate the monotony, as the result of such a task.
But not to deal with Dr Drake in too cavalier a fashion, let ns see whether he may not after all have more reason on his side than we might expect. If he can show strong reasons for thinking that the Sonnets were addressed to Lord Southampton, we may be even compelled to think that Thorpe had used the word “begetter” in an unusual sense. Mr Chalmers’s theory was on the face of it so absurd that it was not necessary to refute it, but as regards Dr Drake let ns at any rate see what the grounds are on the strength of which he would have us set the ordinary meaning of “begetter” on one side.
They are to he found on pp. 62 — 72 of Dr Drake’s second volume, and rest mainly on a certain, though by no means very remarkable, analogy between sonnet 26 and the dedication of Tarquin and Lucrece to Lord Southampton.
That dedication is as follows: —
The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end; whereof this pamphlet, without beginning, is but a superfluous moiety. The warrant I have of your honourable disposition, not the worth of my untutored lines, makes it assured of acceptance. What I have done is yours, what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have, devoted yours. Were my worth greater, my duty would show greater, mean time as it is, it is bound to your lordship to whom I wish long life, still lengthened with happiness.
Your lordship’s in all duty, William Shakspeare.
It may assist the reader to compare the above dedication with sonnet 26, if I repeat the sonnet in this place: —
Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage
Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit,
To thee I send this written ambassage
To witness duty not to show my wit:
Duty so great, which wit so poor as mine
May make seem bare, in wanting words to show it,
But that I hope some good conceit of thine
In thy soul’s thought, all naked, will bestow it;
Till whatsoever star that guides my moving
Points on me graciously with fair aspect,
And puts apparel on my tattered wooing
To show me worthy of thy sweet respect;
Then may I dare to boast how I do love thee;
Till then not show my head where thou may’st prove me.
The imagined closeness of analogy between this sonnet and the dedicatory preface to Tarquin and Lucrece was the sheet anchor of those who upheld the Southampton theory until Mr Sidney Lee in his recent “Life of Shakespeare” put forward an argument which I suppose he must consider even stronger, and with which I will deal presently. Granting, however, that the analogy is greater than I am able to find it, it is a bold measure to argue that because there is some analogy between two documents of like purport, and written by the same person, that they must also be written not only by, but to, the same person. This, however, is what Dr Drake insists on: —
Shakspeare [he writes] opens his dedication to his Lordship with the assurance that his love for him is without end. In correspondence with this assertion the sonnet commences with this remarkable expression, “Lord of my Love”; while the residue tells us, in exact conformity with the prose address, his high sense of his Lordship’s merit and his own unworthiness. (Vol. II., pp. 63, 64.)
We cannot suppose that Dickens had read Dr Drake, but have we not here Serjeant Buzfuz pure and simple, with his “chops and tomato sauce” and his “very very remarkable expression, ‘Don’t trouble yourself about the warming pan’”? Is it not plain that to Dr Drake everything is going so to adhere together that no dram of a scruple, no scruple of a scruple, no obstacle, no incredulous or unsafe circumstance — what can he said? Nothing that can he — can come between him and the conclusion he means to draw.
Dr Drake continues: —
That no doubt may remain of the meaning and direction of this peculiar phraseology, we shall bring forward a few lines from the 110th sonnet, which uniting the language of both the passages just quoted [i e., the preface to “Lucrece” and sonnet 26] most incontrovertibly designates the sex, and, at the same time, we think, the individual to whom they are addressed: —
My best of love,
Now all is done, save what shall have no end;
Mine appetite I never more will grind
On newer proof to try an older friend,
A God in love, to whom I am confin’d.
Let alone the hardihood of making “My best of love” a vocative beginning, instead of the accusative ending that it really is, how can evidence that these lines were addressed to Lord Southampton be extracted from the foregoing quotation except by one who was predetermined to extract it? I have given all that Dr Drake has said upon this point.
Dr Drake then answers a supposed objector, who has asked how the first seventeen sonnets, which are written for the sole purpose of persuading their object to marry, can have been addressed to Lord Southampton since that nobleman, in 1594, when he was only twenty-one, was madly in love with Elizabeth Vernon. Dr Drake replies that Queen Elizabeth opposed the marriage, and succeeded in delaying it till 1599; during this period Lord Southampton may perhaps have impatiently said that if he could not marry Elizabeth Vernon he would die single. This would alarm Shakespeare, who would immediately set about writing the first seventeen sonnets.
