O, then vouchsafe me but this loving thought: To march in ranks of better equipage;1 But since he died and poets better prove, Theirs for their style I'll read, his for his love.' A like vein is pursued in greater exaltation of spirit in Sonnet xxxviii. : How can my Muse want subject to invent, While thou dost breathe, that pour'st into my verse Thine own sweet argument, too excellent For every vulgar paper to rehearse? O give thyself the thanks, if aught in me If my slight Muse do please these curious days, The central conceit here so finely developed-that the patron may claim as his own handiwork the protégé's verse because he inspires it--belongs to the most conventional schemes of dedicatory adulation. When Daniel, in 1592, inscribed his volume of sonnets ' Mr. Tyler assigns this sonnet to the year 1598 or later, on the fallacious ground that this line was probably imitated from an expression in Marston's Pigmalion's Image, published in 1598, where 'stanzas' are said to march rich bedight in warlike equipage.' The suggestion of plagiarism is quite gratuitous. The phrase was common in Elizabethan literature long before Marston employed it. Nash, in his preface to Green's Menaphon, which was published in 1589, wrote that the works of the poet Watson 'march in equipage of honour with any of your ancient poets.' K · entitled Delia' to the Countess of Pembroke, he played in the prefatory sonnet on the same note, and used in the concluding couplet almost the same words as Shakespeare. Daniel wrote: Great patroness of these my humble rhymes, O leave [i.e. cease] not still to grace thy work in me But yet the glory, madam, must be thine. Elsewhere in the Sonnets we hear fainter echoes of the 'Lucrece' epistle. Repeatedly does the sonnetteer renew the assurance given there that his patron is 'part of all' he has or is. Frequently do we meet in the Sonnets with such expressions as these :— [I] by a part of all your glory live (xxxvii. 12); Thou art all the better part of me (xxxix. 2); My spirit is thine, the better part of me (lxxiv. 8); while 'the love without end' which Shakespeare had vowed to Southampton in the light of day reappears in sonnets addressed to the youth as 'eternal love' (cviii. 9), and a devotion 'what shall have no end' (cx. 9). The identification of the rival poets whose 'richly compiled' 'comments' of his patron's 'praise' excited Shakespeare's jealousy is a more difficult inquiry than the identification of the patron. The rival poets with their 'precious phrase by all the Muses filed' (lxxxv. 4) must be sought among the writers who eulogised Southampton and Southamp- are known to have shared his patronage. The field of choice is not small. Southampton from boyhood cultivated literature and the society of Rivals in ton's favour. literary men. In 1594 no nobleman received so abundant a measure of adulation from the con temporary world of letters.1 Thomas Nash justly described the Earl, when dedicating to him his 'Life of Jack Wilton' in 1594, as a dear lover and cherisher as well of the lovers of poets as of the poets themselves.' Nash addressed to him many affectionately phrased sonnets. The prolific sonnetteer Barnabe Barnes and the miscellaneous literary practitioner Gervase Markham confessed, respectively in 1593 and 1595, yearnings for Southampton's countenance in sonnets which glow hardly less ardently than Shakespeare's with admiration for his personal charm. Similarly John Florio, the Earl's Italian tutor, who is traditionally reckoned among Shakespeare's literary acquaintances, wrote to Southampton in 1598, in his dedicatory epistle before his Worlde of Wordes' (an Italian-English dictionary), 'as to me and many more, the glorious and gracious sunshine. of your honour hath infused light and life.' Shakespeare magnanimously and modestly described that protégé of Southampton, whom he deemed a specially dangerous rival, as an 'able' and a 'better' 'spirit,' 'a worthier pen,' a vessel 'of tall building and of goodly pride,' compared with whom he was himself 'a worthless boat.' He detected a touch of magic in the man's writing. His 'spirit,' Shakespeare hyperbolically declared, had been 'by spirits taught to write 1 See Appendix IV. for a full account of Southampton's relations with Nash and other men of letters. Shakespeare's fear of a rival poet. above a mortal pitch,' and 'an affable familiar ghost nightly gulled him with intelligence. Shakespeare's dismay at the fascination exerted on his patron by 'the proud full sail of his [rival's] great verse' sealed for a time, he declared, the springs of his own invention (lxxxvi.) There is no need to insist too curiously on the justice of Shakespeare's laudation of 'the other poet's' powers. He was presumably a new-comer in the literary field who surprised older men of benevolent tendency into admiration by his promise rather than by his achievement. 'Eloquence and courtesy,' wrote Gabriel Harvey at the time, ' are ever bountiful in the amplifying vein ; ' and writers of amiability, Harvey adds, habitually blazoned the perfections that they hoped to see their young friends achieve, in language implying that they had already achieved them. All the conditions of the problem are satisfied by the rival's identification with the young poet and scholar Barnabe Barnes, a poetic panegyrist of Southampton and a prolific sonnetteer, who was deemed by contemporary critics certain to prove a great poet. His first collection of sonnets, Parthenophil and Parthenophe,' with many odes and madrigals interspersed, was printed in 1593; and his second, 'A Centurie of Spiritual Sonnets,' in 1595. Loud applause greeted the first book, which included numerous adaptations from the classical, Italian, and French poets, and disclosed, among many crudities, some fascinating lyrics. and at least one almost perfect sonnet (No. lxvi. 'Ah, sweet content, where is thy sweet abode ?') Barnes probably the rival. Thomas Churchyard called Barnes 'Petrarch's scholar;' the learned Gabriel Harvey bade him 'go forward in maturity as he had begun in pregnancy,' and 'be the gallant poet, like Spenser;' Campion judged his verse Barnabe to be 'heady and strong.' In a sonnet that Barnes addressed in this earliest volume to the 'virtuous' Earl of Southampton he declared that his patron's eyes were 'the heavenly lamps that give the Muses light,' and that his sole ambition was 'by flight to rise' to a height worthy of his patron's 'virtues.' Shakespeare sorrowfully pointed out in Sonnet lxxviii. that his lord's eyes that taught the dumb on high to sing, And heavy ignorance aloft to fly, Have added feathers to the learned's wing, while in the following sonnet he asserted that the 'worthier pen' of his dreaded rival when lending his patron 'virtue' was guilty of plagiarism, for he 'stole that word' from his patron's' behaviour.' The emphasis laid by Barnes on the inspiration that he sought from Southampton's 'gracious eyes' on the one hand, and his reiterated references to his patron's 'virtue' on the other, suggest that Shakespeare in these sonnets directly alluded to Barnes as his chief competitor in the hotly contested race for Southampton's favour. In Sonnet lxxxv. Shakespeare declares that 'he cries Amen to every hymn that able spirit [i.e. his rival] affords.' Very few poets of the day in England followed Ronsard's practice of bestowing the title of hymn on miscellaneous poems, but Barnes twice applies |