Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 10.djvu/352

 NOTES AND QUERIES.

[9 th S. X. Nov. 1, 1902.

would verify the poet's verse and perpetuate his own and his mother's beauty ?

Two recorded events in the life of Shake- speare's youngest brother Edinund seem to me to have a certain bearing on the subject, 'and so far as I am aware they have not been previously noticed in this relationship and may be suggestive.

Mrs. C. C. S topes, in her articles on ' Shakespeare's Family ' in the Genealogical Magazine, vol. i. p. 160, notes :

" Edmund, the youngest child of John and Mary Shakespeare, seems to have been the only one who followed his eldest brother to London. He also chose the stage as a profession, but we never hear of any success. From London registers we know that on 12 August. 1607, in the parish of St. Giles, Cripplegate, was buried ' Edward, the base-born son of Edward Shakespeare, Player,' and that on 31 December of the same year was buried in the church of St. Saviour, Southwark, ' Edmund Shakespeare, Player,' ' with a forenoon knell of the Great Bell.' The poet paid every honour he could to his brother."

Edmund was baptized at Stratford-on-Avon, 3 May, 1580 ; he was sixteen years younger than his brother William, and was only twenty-seven years of age when he died. The first mention of the sonnets is by Francis Meres, M.A., in 1598, and they were pub- lished by Thomas Thorpe in 1609. Thus, presumably, most of the sonnets were written during Edmund's sojourn in London. A dominant factor in the inspiration of the sonnets was the death of Hamnet, Shake- speare's only son, who was buried 11 August, 1596. How else can be explained the heir- hunger, the passionate, pathetic pleading of the poet to a younger man, who is handsome, and whom he dearly loves, to marry and beget an heir, that so the family name and fame might be perpetuated ? Shakespeare's last chance of a direct heir was gone ; hope for a collateral still lingered, and so the saving of the succession, ever uppermost in his mind, became the theme of the earlier sonnets, which he addressed to his " private friends." The concluding couplets of many ring clear the charge :

But if thou live, remember'd not to be, Die single, and thy image dies with thee. iii. Be not self-willed, for thou art much too fair To be death's conquest, and make worms thine

heir. vi.

So thou thyself outgoing in thy noon, Unlook'd on diest unless thou get a son. vii. Make thee another self for love of me That beauty still may live in thine or thee. x. She carved thee for her seal, and meant thereby Thou should print more, nor let that copy die.

xi.

O ! none but unthrifts. Dear my love, you know You had a father : let your son say so. xiii.

But were some child of yours alive that time, You should live twice in it and in my rhyme.

xvii.

The sequel is told in that extract from a London register, and, I believe, in the sonnets. What year the liaison took place it would be impossible to say ; but if the sonnet included in ' The Passionate Pilgrim ' by Jaggard,

Two loves I have, of comfort and despair, Which like two spirits do suggest me still : The better angel is a man right fair, The worser spirit a woman coloured ill, cxliv.

be any indication, it must have taken place in 1599 or before.

Sonnets xxxv., xl., xli., xcv., xcvi., cxx., cxxi. all seem to contain Shakespeare's chiding condemnation, with an underlying feeling of forgiveness and apology for the brother who had waywardly chosen a mis- tress in lieu of a wife. The pain of separa- tion, the corroding sorrow for a faulty relationship, for a broken companionship, are told in the subtle erotics of the Eliza- bethan sonnet. "The true motto for the first group of sonnets," says F. J. Furnivall in his introduction to ' The Leopold,' " is to be seen in David's words, ' I am distrest for thee, my brother Jonathan ; very pleasant hast thou been unto me. Thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of woman.' " Such a motto would bear out to the letter my contention. The solution of the Will sonnets is somewhat simplified. Shakespeare puns for his brother on his own home name Will :

Make but my name thy love, and love that still, And then thou lovest me, for my name is Will.

Edmund's soliloquy on bastardy, ' Lear,' Act I. sc. ii., published 1607, has a peculiar significance, written as it was at an approxi- mate time, and Shakespeare clumsily one would think identifies the character with his brother by the usage of his name. Other considerations present themselves, but I must refrain for the present. As one thinks of the many unavailing efforts to interpret these sphinx-like sonnets the lines of Theodore Watts-Dunton's magnificent poem (slightly altered) present themselves : Shakespeare, "struggling with the years to tell The secret at thy heart through helpless eyes."

W. A. HENDERSON. Dublin.

BISHOP S. WILBERFORCE. As I have been reading vol. i. of Canon Ash well's 'Life of Bishop Wilberforce ' (1879) wherein the bishop's conduct in the Hampden contro- versy leaves a slightly unpleasant flavour on the mental palate I should like to place on record two anecdotes of him which I heard