Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 63.djvu/165

 was admitted to St. John's College, Cambridge. Next summer he sent his guardian Burghley an essay in Ciceronian Latin on the somewhat cynical text that ‘All men are moved to the pursuit of virtue by the hope of reward.’ The paper, an admirable specimen of caligraphy, is preserved at Hatfield. He remained at the university for four years, graduating M.A. at sixteen in 1589. Before leaving college he entered his name as a student at Gray's Inn, and soon afterwards took into his ‘pay and patronage’ John Florio [q. v.], the well-known author and Italian tutor. According to Florio the earl quickly acquired a thorough knowledge of Italian. About 1590, when he was hardly more than seventeen, he was presented to Queen Elizabeth, who showed him kindly notice, and her favourite, the Earl of Essex, thenceforth displayed in his welfare a brotherly interest which proved in course of time a doubtful blessing. In the autumn of 1592 he was in the throng of noblemen that accompanied Elizabeth to Oxford, and was recognised as the most handsome and accomplished of all the young lords who frequented the royal presence. In 1593 Southampton was mentioned for nomination as a knight of the garter, and although he was not chosen the compliment of nomination was, at his age, unprecedented outside the circle of the sovereign's kinsmen. On 17 Nov. 1595 he distinguished himself in the lists set up in the queen's presence in honour of the thirty-seventh anniversary of her accession, and was likened by George Peel, in his account of the scene in his ‘Anglorum Feriæ,’ to Bevis of Southampton, the ancient type of chivalry.

Literature was from early manhood a chief interest of Southampton's life, and before he was of age he achieved wide reputation as a patron of the poets. From the hour that, as a handsome and accomplished lad, he joined the court and made London his chief home, authors acknowledged his appreciation of literary effort of almost every quality and form. His great wealth was freely dispensed among his literary eulogists. In 1593 Barnabe Barnes appended a sonnet in his honour to his collection of sonnets called ‘Parthenophil and Parthenophe;’ in 1594 Thomas Nash described him, when dedicating to him his romance of ‘Jack Wilton,’ as ‘a dear lover and cherisher as well of the lovers of poets as of the poets themselves.’ For him Nash seems to have penned at the same time a lascivious poem entitled ‘The Choosing of Valentines,’ which opens and closes with a sonnet to ‘Lord S[outhampton].’ In 1595 Gervase Markham inscribed to him in a sonnet his patriotic poem on Sir Richard Grenville's fight off the Azores. In 1598 Florio associated with his name his great Italian-English dictionary, ‘A Worlde of Wordes.’ But the chief of Southampton's poetic clients was Shakespeare. In April 1593 Shakespeare dedicated to Southampton his poem ‘Venus and Adonis;’ there Shakespeare's language merely suggests the ordinary relations subsisting between a Mæcenas and a poetic aspirant to his favourable notice. In May 1594 Shakespeare again greeted Southampton as his patron, dedicating to him his second narrative poem ‘Lucrece.’ In his second dedicatory epistle to the earl Shakespeare used the language of devoted friendship; although such language was common at the time in communication between patrons and poets, Shakespeare's employment of it is emphatic enough to suggest that his intimacy with Southampton had become very close since he dedicated ‘Venus and Adonis’ to him in more formal language a year before.

Evidence of Southampton's love for the Elizabethan drama is abundant, and there is a very substantial corroboration of Southampton's regard for Shakespeare, which the dedications of the two narrative poems attest, in the statement made by Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeare's first adequate biographer, on the competent authority of Sir William D'Avenant. This statement runs thus: ‘There is one instance so singular in its magnificence of this patron of Shakespeare's [i.e. the Earl of Southampton], that if I had not been assured that the story was handed down by Sir William D'Avenant, who was probably very well acquainted with his affairs, I should not venture to have inserted; that my lord Southampton at one time gave him a thousand pounds to enable him to go through with a purchase which he heard he had a mind to. A bounty very great and very rare at any time.’

Southampton is the only patron of Shakespeare who is positively known to biographers of the dramatist. There is therefore strong external presumption in favour of Southampton's identification with the anonymous friend and patron whom the poet describes in his sonnets as the sole object of his poetic adulation. The theory that the majority of Shakespeare's sonnets were addressed to Southampton is powerfully supported by internal evidence. Several of the sonnets which are avowedly addressed to the patron of the writer's poetry embody language almost identical with that employed by Shakespeare in the dedicatory epistle of ‘Lucrece.’ Elsewhere Shakespeare complains that his own