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Sunday, October 12, 2025

Sonnet 8 and Sonnet 8.

In the notes to volume 16 of James O. Halliwell's The Works of Shakespeare, we learn the following regarding Sonnet 8 from the 1609 Sonnets of Shake-speare.1

This sonnet occurs in the following form in a manuscript miscellany of the first part of the seventeenth century,—


In laudem musice et opprobrium contemptorii ejusdem.


                                1.

Musicke to heare, why hearest thou musicke sadly?

Sweete wth sweetes warre not, joy delights in joy ;

Why lovest yu that wch thou receavest not gladly.

Or els receavest wth pleasure thine annoy?


                                2.

If the true concord of well tuned soundes

By unions maried, doe offend thy eare,

They doe but sweetlie chide thee, whoe confoundes

In singlenes a parte wch thou shouldst beare.


                                3.

Marke howe one stringe, sweet husband to another,

Strikes each on each by mutuall orderinge,

Resemblinge childe, and syer, and happy mother,

Wch all in one this single note dothe singe:

Whose speechles songe, beeinge many, seeming one.

Singe this to thee, Thou single shalt prove none.


W. Shakspeare.


Frederick J. Furnivall thought he'd discovered the copy and presented his finding in an article entitled “An Early Ms. Copy of Shakspere’s Eighth Sonnet” in The Academy, December 1880.2


AN EARLY MS. COPY OF SHAKSPERE's EIGHTH SONNET.

London: Dec. 17, 1880.


In the Additional MS. 15,226, a little miscellany of poems, &c., in the British Museum, is a copy of Shakspere's eighth sonnet, in a hand which Prof. S. R. Gardiner and I think to be of the earlier part of James I.'s reign, and having some various readings. Though these may be of little or no value, yet Shakspere students may be glad to see them, and I accordingly send you a transcript of the sonnet.

These early MS. copies are very rare. The present one may have been printed before, but I have not seen the print, and it is not noticed in the Cambridge Shakspere.


Before the article went to press he'd been informed that Halliwell had priority.

Furnivall did us the favor of specifying the manuscript for his copy as British Library Additional MS. 15226. He also printed his text with a number of Halliwell's orthographic modernizations restored to the original.

MS 15226 would not seem to be publicly available in digital facsimile. The description in the Folger Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450–1700 (CELM) is followed by a particularly spare catalog of the contents.

Add. MS 15226

An octavo miscellany of verse and prose, in several largely secretary hands, written from both ends over a long period, 149 leaves, in modern half blue morocco. c.1627-c.1673.

The secretary hands suggest entries could have been made during the 16th century, before italic became the norm. But some of the works copied are said to be copied from books published as late as 1637 when a partial version of “An Epitaph upon King James” (f. 26r) was published in William Camden's Remaines. Being only partial would suggest that the copyist could have had his original from any time after March of 1625.

Hyder Rollins surely saw 15226 before he assigned it “ later than 1640”.3 Raymond Alden has it “probably dating (according to Dr. C. W. Wallace) from the period of the Commonwealth”.4

Of course, the “several” hands suggests more than one owner probably over a period of time. The Latin title and identification of Shakespeare as author are of particular interest. We've already noticed that some of the extremely rare manuscript copies of the sonnets had titles that seem to have pre-dated the 1609 published copy. None of them, however, were attributed any author. The attribution here strongly suggests the copy was taken from 1609 Sonnets directly or at second-hand.

Several of the items listed in the CELM description have Latin titles that are not original to the associated work. The song ‘Hence, all you vain delights’ (f. 28v-9r) from Beaumont and Fletcher's, The Nice Valour, for a particular example, is entitled  “In laudem Melancholie”. The song was first published in A Description of the King and Queene of Fayries (London, 1634). The little information available concerning Add. MS. 15226 suggests that one of the owners of the manuscript book was in the habit of providing his own Latin titles. It is unlikely that the title here for Sonnet 8 was ever in more general circulation or ever applied by Shakespeare. The text is otherwise so close to the 1609 that there can be little doubt that this was the copyist's source.

Of the rare number of manuscript copies of poems attributed to Shakespeare, this copy of Sonnet 8 attracts the least attention. Likely because the text is so close to the poem as published in 1609.



1Halliwell, James O. The Works of Shakespeare (1865). 433.

2 “An Early Ms. Copy of Shakspere’s Eighth Sonnet” in The Academy, Vol. 28. December 1880. 462.

3Rollins, Hyder. A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare. The Sonnets. (1944). I.23n.

4Alden. Raymond Macdonald. The Sonnets of Shakespeare (1916). 33.



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Sunday, September 28, 2025

The Sonnets of Shakespeare: Sonnet 86.


86


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,

Above a mortall pitch, that struck me dead?

No, neither he, nor his compiers by night

Giving 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 fild up his line,

Then lackt I matter, that infeebled mine.



3. inhearce] Schmidt (1874): Enclose as in a coffin. enhearse, inhearce, inhearse] OED. To put into a hearse.

4. (all to precious)] all too precious

13. countenance] approval. Double entendre likely upon “face / likeness”.

13. fild] filled


Commentary in Alden:


1.] —Furnivall: [This line] probably alludes to the swelling hexameters of Chapman's Englishing of Homer.

4.] —Malone: Cf. R. & J., II, iii, 9-10:

The earth, that's nature's mother, is her tomb;

What is her burying grave, that is her womb.

—Rolfe: We find the same thought in Lucretius, v. 259: "Omniparens eadem rerum commune sepulchrum."

—Walsh: Cf. ["To Time," by "A. W.," in Davison's Poetical Rhapsody:] "Thy womb, that all doth breed, is tomb to all."

—Verity: Cf. Spenser, Ruins of Time:

The seeds of which all things at first were bred

Shall in great Chaos' womb again be hid.

5. spirit . . . spirits.] —Massey [finds here the chief evidence of Marlowe as rival poet:] Sh. speaks of Marlowe and identifies him with the "familiar" spirit, Mephistopheles, just as Thorpe does when he dedicates the translation of Lucan's first book to Edward Blunt, and alludes to Marlowe as a "familiar spirit." [Marlowe was generally believed to practice necromancy as a student of black magic.

9-10.] —Steevens: Alluding perhaps to the celebrated Dr. Dee's pretended intercourse with an angel, and other familiar spirits. 

—Massey: Who does not recognize Faustus, his necromancy, and his boasts of what he will have the spirits do for him? Who does not see that Sh., thinking dramatically, has identified Marlowe with Faustus and thrown him on the stage, where, in vision — if it be not an actual fact that the play was running at the Curtain Theatre while Sh. was composing that sonnet — he sees his familiar Mephistopheles "gulling him nightly" with such intelligence as that "in Hell are all manner of delights." [Cf. especially the line in Dr. Faustus, "They say thou hast a familiar spirit," etc.] (Qu. Rev., 115: 447.) Henry Brown, [taking Davies as rival poet, thinks Drayton may have been the] intelligencer alluded to, as aiding Davies, like an evil spirit, with dark suggestions, (p. 193.)

—G. Stronach, [(N. & Q., 9th s., 12: 141) taking the sonnet series to be a miscellany like the Pass. Pilgrim, believes that this sonnet was written about Sh. by Barnes.]


Was Shakespeare Gay? What Do the Sonnets Really Say?

Commentary in Rollins:


1. proud full saile] —Beeching (ed. 1904): So in Sonnet 80.6: “proudest sail.”—Brooke (ed. 1936):4 The proud full-sail,’ verse like a ship with all canvas spread.—In the line Lee (ed. 1907) denies a reference to Chapman: Chapman’s poetic style, though very involved, cannot be credited with exceptional dignity. Shakespeare’s words will not bear too literal an interpretation.— Pooler (ed. 1918): This, if not ironical, could apply only to Marlowe’s verse or Chapman’s, and Marlowe died in 1593; would good verse be inspired by the gulling of an affable ghost?—Tucker (ed. 1924): The epithets all belong to the picture of a great galleon with full-spread sails setting forth to win rich ‘prizes’ on the Spanish main (as did Raleigh in 1597). Meanwhile the poet hints that the rival is seeking, not (as he himself does) the love of the patron, but a rich material return.

9. affable familiar ghost] —Gissing, 1883 (Letters, 1927 ed., p. 132), calls this a “marvellous phrase.”—In lines 9 f. Steevens (ed. 1780) sees an allusion “to the celebrated Dr. Dee’s pretended intercourse with an angel, and other familiar spirits.”

13. fild up] —Tucker (ed. 1924): Shakespeare was not afraid of the verse of his rival in itself, but only when the patron lent it his countenance. This ‘fill’d up’ anything that might be lacking in it.



General Commentary:


—Tyler: To Professor Minto (Characteristics of English Poets, 2nd edit., p, 221 seq.) is due the identification of the rival poet of the Sonnets with George Chapman, an identification so complete as to leave no reasonable doubt on the matter.

5. by spirits taught, etc.] —Tucker: This cannot mean ‘taught by other men of genius’ (the ‘compeers’ of 1. 7), since ‘other’ would be indispensable; nor would these teach him to write ‘above a mortal pitch.’ The ‘spirits’ are the disembodied geniuses of the past, from whom the rival, as a man of learning, derived inspiration and matter. It is true that, when alive, such geniuses were ‘mortal,’ but as now spirits, they are something more, and their influence may be supposed to be of a higher nature.

—Sams, Eric: 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.

...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 own Sonnets to Coelia (1594): “What tell'st thou me, by spells thou hast won thy dear?”

10. gulls him.] —Tucker: It is difficult to believe that this means ‘deludes,’ since the rival writes ‘above a mortal pitch,’ etc. More probably, a ‘gull’ being a young unfledged bird, to ‘gull’ is to treat as such, i.e. to feed him with what he cannot obtain for himself. The food is ‘intelligence,’ or what we should call ‘ideas.’


Editor's Commentary:


—Purdy: 5. spirits... spirits] (“Closing the Deal” Virtual Grub Street.) “refers to Edmund Spenser's call to the ghost of Sir Philip Sidney, in the poem Ruine of Time (1596), to inspire (breathe into) him:

O noble spirite! live there ever blessed,

*

Thereto doo thou my humble spirite raise,

And into me that sacred breath inspire,

Which thou there breathest perfect and entire.”

—Purdy: 9-10. affable...gulls] (“Closing the Deal” Virtual Grub Street.) Sir Walter 'Raleigh (then a particularly affable intimate of that circle) “gulling” him after their return to their lodgings each night.'



Sources Cited:


Alden, Raymond Macdonald. The Sonnets of Shakespeare from the Quarto of 1609 with variorum readings and commentary (1916).

Malone, Edmund. Plays and Poems of W. Sh., with the corrections and illustrations of various commentators... etc. (1821). [James Boswell.] 

Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. “How Shakespeare's Rival Poet Sonnets Prove Edmund Spenser the Rival.” Virtual Grub Street,  https://gilbertwesleypurdy.blogspot.com/2025/08/how-shakespeares-rival-poet-sonnets.html

Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. “Closing the Deal: Edmund Spenser was the Rival Poet.” Virtual Grub Street, https://gilbertwesleypurdy.blogspot.com/2025/08/closing-deal-edmund-spenser-was-rival.html

Rolfe, W. J. Shakespeare's Sonnets (No date. c. 1904)

Rollins, Hyder. A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare. The Sonnets. Volume 1. (1944).

Sams, Eric. “Who was the Rival Poet of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 86?” Accessed September 28, 2025. https://ericsams.org/index.php/on-shakespeare/essays-and-reviews/166-who-was-the-rival-poet-of-shakespeare-s-sonnet-86

Tyler, Thomas. Shakespeare's Sonnets (1890). 33.

Tucker, T.G. The Sonnets of Shakespeare Edited from the Quarto of 1609 (1924).

Verity, A. W. The Works of William Shakespeare, Vol. 8. Sonnets. Introduction and Notes by A. W. Verity

Walsh, C.M. Shakespeare's Complete Sonnets. A new arrangement,... (1908).



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Friday, August 29, 2025

The Rival Poets: A Peek Behind the Curtain.

In this series:

Upon accepting Edmund Spenser as the rival described in Shakespeare's Rival Poet sonnets, not only does Queen Elizabeth I clearly emerge as the recipient of Shakespeare's Rival Poet sonnets, and all of Shakespeare's Monument Sonnets, but a number of impediments are removed from reading certain poems by Edmund Spenser and by Shakespeare.

The first thing that becomes obvious is that the odds are astronomically against the Stratford man being the playwright Shakespeare. The intimacy with which the Queen is addressed requires an author of noble stature. And not just any man but a man with a deep personal relationship to the Queen.

So much in the plays and poems corresponds with the life of Edward de Vere that, together with this requirement, he becomes the leading candidate. Still more, Vere's appeals to bring an end to his extended exile from the Queen's presence correspond to sonnets 50-51. His memory of the time he was her favorite, and his hope to return to be so once again, closely corresponds with sonnet 521.

Taken in isolation, mere sonnets cannot possibly be definitive. But taken together with the plays and other sonnets, and the historical record a noble man so close to royalty was bound to leave behind, a life emerges. The historical record takes on flesh and blood.

The publication of Spenser's The Faerie Queene stunned the Elizabethan literary world. The shock was so great that its tremors are found in the works of Shakespeare. What else could be the case?

Was Shakespeare Gay? What Do the Sonnets Really Say?

The first three books, published in 1590, included a dedicatory sonnet to Edward de Vere.

To the right Honourable the Earle of Oxenford Lord

high Chamberlayne of England


BY EDMUND SPENSER.


RECEIVE, most Noble Lord, in gentle gree,

The unripe fruit of an unready wit ;

Which by thy countenaunce doth crave to bee

Defended from foule Envies poisnous bit.

Which so to doe may thee right well besit,

Sith th'antique glory of thine auncestry

Under a shady vele is therein writ,

And eke thine owne long living memory,

Succeeding them in true nobility :

And also for the love which thou doest beare

To th' Heliconian ymps, and they to thee ;

They unto thee, and thou to them, most deare.

Deare as thou art unto thy selfe, so love

That loves and honours thee, as doth behove.

This much might be expected given the reputation of the earl as among England's finest poets and playwrights. Also the two did likely share a venue in the 1573 anthology, An Hundreth Sundrie Flowers2 before Spenser gravitated toward the Sidney circle at Wilton House.

Shakespeare's works show a familiarity with the goings on around the Wilton group. The same could be said of Vere, while he gathered Walter Raleigh, Tom Watson, John Lyly, Anthony Munday and many others of the London literati around him at the Royal Court and his rooms at the Savoy. In 1580 he acquired the London mansion called “Fisher's Folly” and the group revolved around that address.

Raleigh and Spenser traveled to Ireland, in 1580, with the English army under the Lord Grey, Baron of Wilton. Both received Irish estates for their service. Raleigh returned to London, leaving his in care of servants. Spenser remained a resident of Ireland for the remainder of his life, twice visiting London at Raleigh's invitation and once more, to die, following the destruction of his Irish estate by rebels.

It is an interesting question as to whether the line “Deare as thou art unto thy selfe” might be a bit of a jab at Vere. Usage was much looser in Tudor times. It need not have been.

A congratulatory poem appears in the same 1590 edition of The Faerie Queene by “Ignoto”. This is generally considered to be a moniker employed by Shakespeare. Here it is written in the form since called “Venus and Adonis” stanza. No jab is returned upon the author. The praise is completely an act of the highest praise.

To looke upon a worke of rare devise

The which a workman setteth out to view,

And not to yield it the deserved prise,

That unto such a workmanship is dew.

Doth either prove the judgement to be naught,

Or els doth shew a mind with envy fraught.

Accepting these as words of Shakespeare, in 1590, by the time he was writing the Rival Poet sonnets the 1596 second volume had been published. Among the mix of emotions they contain is included envy.

There is a jab or two at Spenser but no worse. Perhaps done in return for the line in the dedicatory poem.

Yet what of thee thy Poet doth invent,

He robs thee of, and payes it thee againe,

Still, there is no rancor. Shakespeare knows his sonnets have been displaced by a work of genius and cannot bring himself to say otherwise.3

That there is a jab at the queen in Sonnet #84, and that it does contain a touch of rancor, suggests that one of the sonnets was not designed for her eyes.

You to your beautious blessings adde a curse,

Being fond on praise, which makes your praises worse.4

The theme of the Rival Poet sonnets is that Shakespeare's monument to the Queen presented her actual self rather than making of her a faerie land character. Spenser, he said, several times throughout, had actually devalued her by implying she must be transformed into a faerie queene in order to be admired.

And their grosse painting might be better us’d,

Where cheekes need blood, in thee it is abusd.

Her real beauty could only be found in the sonnets, he averred. In real life she was even more beautiful than in faerie land.

In the meantime, all of these poems give us a peek behind the curtain. A verbal jab here and there, perhaps; a witty turn, there and here; an exasperated word on the queen, even; monikers and pen-names for the reasons of the time and place.



2See my Shakespeare in 1573: Apprenticeship and Scandal. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B096GSQV14

3Time, of course, has reversed the estimates.

4Shake-speare's Sonnets, #84.



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Thursday, August 07, 2025

Closing the Deal: Edmund Spenser was the Rival Poet.

Standard Citation: Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. “Closing the Deal: Edmund Spenser was the Rival Poet.” Virtual Grub Street, enter url here [state date accessed].


In this series:


 

86

Was it the proud full saile of his great verse,

Bound for the prize of (all to[o] 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,

Above a mortall pitch, that struck me dead?

No, neither he, nor his compiers by night

Giving 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 fild up his line,

Then lackt I matter, that infeebled mine.

As observed in the first part of this series, “I am a worthlesse bote, / He of tall building, and of goodly pride.” of Sonnet 80, and the “proud full sail,” here, in Sonnet 86, refer to stanza vii of the Dedicatory Canto to Queen Elizabeth I in Book VI of The Faerie Queene in which Spenser compares his poem to a ship sailing upon a long, diverse sea voyage:

Like as a ship, that through the Ocean wyde

Directs her course unto one certaine co[a]st,

Is met of many a counter winde and tyde,

With which her winged speed is let and crost,

And she her selfe in stormie surges tost;

Yet, making many a borde and many a bay,

Still winneth way, ne hath her compasse lost:

Right so it fares with me in this long way,

Whose course is often stayd, yet never is astray.

The queen both rules the ocean and is the Ocean in the book. But these are only two of many references in Shakespeare's Rival Poet Sonnets to The Faerie Queene and other of Spenser's poems published during his second visit to London, in 1595-6.

The “spirit” in Sonnet 86, refers to Edmund Spenser's call to the ghost of Sir Philip Sidney, in the poem Ruine of Time (1596), to inspire (breathe into) him:

O noble spirite! live there ever blessed,

*

Thereto doo thou my humble spirite raise,

And into me that sacred breath inspire,

Which thou there breathest perfect and entire.

Sidney was the paragon of poetry and chivalry having died young while acting heroically in battle. He was also Spenser's host at Penshurst for a time. The queen would have recognized Shakespeare's reference.

It was Sir Walter Raleigh who arranged for Spenser's first visit to London, and the Royal Court, in 1590. Having read the first three books of The Faerie Queene, at the time, he abandoned an epic on the queen that he himself was writing and began a campaign at Court for the queen and courtiers to read Spenser's. Raleigh was particularly popular at Court, even while he was technically-speaking imprisoned within The Tower for impregnating one of the queen's ladies-in-waiting, and he was almost certainly the “affable ghost” referred to in the sonnet.

When Raleigh convinced the poet to accompany him to the royal court, at the very end of 1589, it also resulted in Spenser's poem Colin Clouts Come Home Againe describing the social circle at court at a level of detail he could only have gotten so quickly from Raleigh (then a particularly affable intimate of that circle) “gulling” him after their return to their lodgings each night. The gulling presumably continued by letter.

Colin Clout and the first full edition of The Faerie Queene both came out in early 1596. The dedication letter to Clout was dated 1591, and the years of the visit were essentially 1590-1, indicating that a manuscript edition was circulated as early as 1590. Numerous references to events as late as 1594, in the print edition, show that the print text was revised for publication. The first half of The Faerie Queene was published in 1590 but did not include the Book VI passages referenced in the Rival Poet Sonnets.

The “Ruine of Time” was published in the volume Complaints: Containing Sundrie Small Poems of the Worlds Vanitie in 1591. It was dedicated to the Countess of Pembroke, in the memory of her brother Philip Sidney, and thanks for her “manie singular favours & great graces”.

Spenser also published his Fowre hymnes in 1596: two each to Love and to Beauty. The dedicatory letter, to the Countesses of Cumberland and Warwick, refers to the hymns having been circulated in manuscript well before they were published. Portions — in particular the praise of Wisdom, the virgin Queen — seems written to flatter Elizabeth:

The soveraine dearling of the Deity,

Clad like a Queene in royall robes, most fit

For so great powre and peerelesse majesty,

*

And on her head a crowne of purest gold

Is set, in signe of highest soveraignty;

And in her hand a scepter she doth hold,

Nevertheless, this queen controls both heaven and earth to a degree that suggests more than her sovereignty over the Anglican church. The reader is left to interpret as he or she will. Few would have missed the reference.

In Shakespeare's Sonnet 85, lines 7-10, we read:

To every Himne that able spirit affords,

In polisht forme of well refined pen.

Hearing you praisd, I say ’tis so, ’tis true,

And to the most of praise adde some-thing more,

Interesting that he speaks of the Rival Poet writing hymns to praise the queen at a time that his rival was also celebrated for writing hymns of remarkable beauty. As if he had conflated all of it — The Faerie Queene and the Fowre Hymns — as hymns to a faerie goddess who ruled over them at a pitch that mere sonnets could not reach.



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