Introducing the Shakespeare Authorship Vault and the Seashore of Bohemia.

Life is a convoluted piece of work, to be sure. Digging away in the mines of literary scholarship the begrimed miner does well to remember the fact.

As the result, I have gathered vast ranges and profound depths of information in the folders into which I place my ore for transportation to the surface. With luck, an almost inexplicable alchemy will make a bin of the ore here and there into a small bit of silver and gold. But even the metaphor of alchemy has its limitations and most of the processing arrives at iron — essential for building but not particularly precious.

Because there is a vast labyrinthine Internet sufficiently well indexed that the tiny corner which has been dedicated to collecting millions of digital facsimile editions of the written / printed word, from ancient times to the present, can be accessed, I can accomplish an astonishing amount mining alone. Far more, as it turns out, than I could accomplish by signing onto a corporation, profit or non-profit.

Nearly as much of the search, it very much bears mentioning, is done in the notes and bibliographies in those facsimile books. The pre-Internet world built an impressive and vitally important part of the Internet search machinery.

The necessarily slapdash indexing system that I have managed to cobble together over the years for thousands of harvested items struggles mightily to facilitate access to tens of thousands. More and more of the ore sits waiting in its folder. So much more that it can even be difficult to recall what sits waiting exactly where. So much more than there is likely to be time to process in the end.

All of this said, I have long been considering options to better organize this ore and to turn as much as possible into useful information. Looked at from any number of sides, it comes to me that there is much more useful information to be had than is generally subsumed into the essay form.

Publishing raw notes, references and data can provide a valuable service. To shift to a new metaphor, they are the seeds for essays many of which I will not be available to write. They will also seed those I am able to write. But what should be the format?

As fate would have it, these thoughts have come together at the same time that Anne Katherine, a member of my Edward de Vere was Shakespeare Facebook group, has asked “can anyone point me to documentation about Bohemia having a sea coast in the 16^th century?” It is a question that has had to wait its turn in the quasi-eternal queue. This seemed a promising candidate for the first safety deposit box (0001) in my new Shakespeare Authorship Vault blog. If the pieces came properly together I would have: 1) an introductory essay (this); 2) an essay to answer Ms. Katherine's question (pending); and could withdraw and display a box filled with the collection of the materials consulted in the process of chasing down the answer (the final step).

So far, this seems to be coming together provisionally well. The first item of information to be passed along is that the search has taken vastly too much time. In the better questions it always does. They actually resolve into numerous tiny but absolutely essential processual queries each of which can take days to answer as precisely as is possible.

The first clue, in this instance, was a common reference in 1880 editions of Robert Greene's Pandosto or Dorastus and Fawnia to a German essay on the mysterious source for Greene's work which is the main source for Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. For one example:

In a series of articles contributed to Englische Studien (1878, 1888), Caro traced the germ of the romance to certain events which occurred in the fourteenth-century history of Poland and Bohemia. Duke Ziemowit of Massow, conceiving suspicions of his wife, cast her into prison, where she bore a son. By the duke's orders, the queen was strangled, but the boy, carried away in secret, was brought up by a peasant woman. The king never ceased to lament his action, and eventually his son was restored to him. We may see in the unfortunate wife the prototype of Bellaria and Hermione, and in the cup-bearer Dobek that of Franion and Camillo. Caro further imagined that in Dorastus' description of himself as "a knight born and brought up in Trapolonia” , there is a reference to Massow. The name Sicilia he took to be a corruption of Silesia. It is significant in this connection, that Greene makes the wife of Egistus a daughter of the Emperor of Russia.¹

This quote has been waiting to be used toward the question as to whether or not Bohemia had a seashore at any time in its medieval or early modern history. It turns out to be the essential first step.

To this I will add that German journals such as the Englische Studien were among the better sources of Shakespeare scholarship in their day. In general, the German scholarly journals added immeasurably to Shakespeare studies in German and English. This particular journal, however, seems only to have published work in German.

1 Greene, Robert. Pandosto or Dorastus and Fawnia (1588, 1907). P.G. Thomas, ed. xv-xvi.

Also at Virtual Grub Street:

• Invention in a Noted Weed: the Poetry of William Shakespeare. September 21, 2024. “The coward conquest of a wretches knife,...”

• The Sonnets of Shakespeare: Sonnet 108. Edward de Vere to his son, Henry. “That may expresse my love, or thy deare merit?”

• Sonnet 130: Shakespeare's Reply to a 1580 Poem by Thomas Watson. September 7, 2024. “Interesting to see our Derek Hunter debating with Dennis McCarthy, at the North group,...”.
• Rocco Bonetti's Blackfriars Fencing School and Lord Hunsdon's Water Pipe. August 12, 2023. “... the tenement late in the tenure of John Lyllie gentleman & nowe in the tenure of the said Rocho Bonetti...”

• Check out the Shakespeare Authorship Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.

• Check out the Letters Index: Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford for many letters from this fascinating time, some related to the Shakespeare Authorship Question.

Twisted Twine, Lustie Ver: Branding with Puns in Tudor Times.

It has recently been brought up, in a comment thread, at the Edward de Vere was Shakespeare Facebook Group, that “ever the same” in Shakespeare's sonnet 76 gives every appearance of being a pun on Queen Elizabeth's motto Semper Eadem: “ever the same”. This resolves with ease to “E. Ver, the same”:

Why write I still all one, E. Ver, the same,

And keep invention in a noted weed,

That every word doth almost tell my name,

Showing their birth, and where they did proceed?

(The italics are my own.) This is punning on a level that was much appreciated by Tudor readers — including Tudor monarchs.

Interested to investigate more deeply, member Patrick Roux has asked 'are there extant examples of Edward de Vere using “Ver” or “Ver.” in his communications?' And the answer does, indeed, prove to be particularly interesting.

Perhaps it is best, however, to begin with the works of Thomas Twine. Though little known now, even to scholars, he was quite popular during the 1570s. As I have pointed out in my Shakespeare in 1573 (2021):

81. In 1573, Twine was at the height of his fame. In that year he published his continuation of the translation of the Aeneid left unfinished at Thomas Phaer’s death which would be both authors’ signature work to this day. It was one of several books he published in that year, including The Breuiary of Brytayne, etc., which he dedicated to “Edward Deuiere Lorde Bulbeck, Erle of Oxenford, Lorde great Chamberlayne of England”.¹

As it turns out, one can get a good idea of what portions of the Aeneid Twine translated because they contained an unusual number of instances of the words “twine” and variations upon “twisted,”and “twisted twine.”

This was true of all of the works of Thomas Twine. Not only that, but his friends were in on the branding. In the Breviary, a commendatory poem entitled “A freind, in prayse of the Authour,” includes the line “The Latin thou, the English Twyne did twyst,...”.

So then, it need not come as any surprise that an echo poem written by Edward de Vere appears in the Arundel Harington manuscripts under the heading “The best verse that ever th'author made” that includes the following lines:

O heavens quod she whoe was the fyrst that bredd in me this fevear – vear

whoe was the fyrst that gave the wound whose scar I wear for ever. vere

what cruell Cupide to my harmes vsurpes the golden quiver. vere

what wight fyrst caughte this hart & can from bondage yt deliver vere²

It is worth pointing out that the second quoted line would easily support the pun we are discussing: “the wound whose scar I wear for E Ver.”

All of these copies make clear that the author was Edward de Vere and the melancholy maid was Anne Vavasour. Because their illegitimate son was born on March 21, 1581 [N.S.], and the two separated at that point as lovers, the poem was very likely written before November of 1580.

Thus one of the poems Vere's close friend Thomas Watson contributed to the 1573 anthology An Hundreth Sundrie Flowers makes clear that Vere's name was regularly the instrument of pun and branding at least by that date.

The lustie Ver which whillome might exchange

My griefe to joy, and then my joyes encrease,

Springs now elsewhere, and showes to me but strange,...³

The pun here being upon the name Vere and the common Latin word for spring, ver. Another young woman is melancholy. This time because the “lustie Ver” once shown on her and now shines on someone other than her.

All the young women at court are said to have been greatly disappointed when Edward de Vere — the greatest catch at court — chose to marry Anne Cecil, on December 16, 1571. Likely this is the cause of the maid's grief.

In Watson's Latin envoi to his book Hekatompathia or Passionate Century of Love (1582) — a book he dedicated “To the Right Honorable my very good Lord Edward de Vere, Earle of Oxenford, etc.” — he turns the pun around.

Et tamen exhibitum Vero, qui magna meretur

Virtute et vera nobilitate sua.

*

Dum famulus Verum comitaris in aurea tecta,

Officj semper sit tibi cura tui.⁴

[And also [Vere / True] stands forth, who displays

Such great virtue [lustiness] and his true nobility.

*

While the family [Vere /true] accompanies the golden canopy,

The office forever entrusted to the care of you and yours.]⁵

I go more into the close relationship between Watson, Vere and Shakespeare and their poetries in my Shakespeare in 1573 and in various essays on my Virtual Grub Street linked from my Edward de Vere was Shakespeare Group and Page. There more there than Vere puns.

While there is much more to be revealed on the subject, I will finish for present purposes with one final example that seems yet to be noticed. An epistle attached to the 1609 First Quarto of the play Troilus & Cressida — published some five years after the death of Edward de Vere — entitled after a fashion long considered a mystery.

A never writer, to an ever reader. Newes.

At the beginning of the 17^th century, the Middle English and early modern English “ne” construction, meaning not, was rarely used. While it had gone out of use, however, it was well known from the reading of any educated person.

The author of the epistle, we should know, was quite well aware of the construction by the fact that the title was surely meant to be read among insiders as “A Ne Ver writer, to an E. Ver reader” or “A Not Vere writer, to an E. Vere reader.”

Perhaps Mr. Roux will consider his question answered.

1 Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. Shakespeare in 1573: Apprenticeship and Scandal (2021). 81. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B096GSQV14

2Hughey, Ruth. The Arundel Harington Manuscript of Tudor Poetry (1960). [179], II.215. Close variations appear in the contemporary manuscript collections Bodleian MS., Rawlinson Poetry, 85, fol. 11r., Archbishop Marsh's Library, MS. 183 Z 3.5.21, fol. 20V, and Folger MS. I,112, fol. 12r.

3Cunliffe, John W. The Complete Works of George Gascoigne (1907). A Hundreth Sundrie Flowers (1573). “Hearbes” I.334.

4 Arber, Edward. Thomas Watson Poems (1870). 32.

5 Sonnet 125. “Were't ought to me I bore the canopy,...” 

Also at Virtual Grub Street:

• Invention in a Noted Weed: the Poetry of William Shakespeare. September 21, 2024. “The coward conquest of a wretches knife,...”

• The Sonnets of Shakespeare: Sonnet 108. Edward de Vere to his son, Henry. “That may expresse my love, or thy deare merit?”

• Sonnet 130: Shakespeare's Reply to a 1580 Poem by Thomas Watson. September 7, 2024. “Interesting to see our Derek Hunter debating with Dennis McCarthy, at the North group,...”.
• Rocco Bonetti's Blackfriars Fencing School and Lord Hunsdon's Water Pipe. August 12, 2023. “... the tenement late in the tenure of John Lyllie gentleman & nowe in the tenure of the said Rocho Bonetti...”

• Check out the Shakespeare Authorship Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.

• Check out the Letters Index: Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford for many letters from this fascinating time, some related to the Shakespeare Authorship Question.

Shakespeare's Luffa: the Sonnets as Autobiography.

The question as to whether Shakespeare's sonnets are autobiographical has been asked ever since a Shakespeare industry arose in the mid-18^th century. It was first asked, most pointedly, in respect of the sexuality they seemed to evidence.

I quote from my own Was Shakespeare Gay?¹

Preemptive explanations were of the utmost importance. The venerable and irreproachable Steevens’ comments were cited.

—the master mistress of my passion,] It is impossible to read this fulsome panegyrick addressed, to a male object, without an equal mixture of disgust and indignation. We may remark also, that the same phrase employed by Shakspeare to denote the height of encomium, is used by Dryden to express the extreme of reproach.

“That woman, but more daub’d; or if a man,

Corrupted to a woman, thy man mistress.” Don Sebastian.

Let me be just, however, to our author, who has made a proper use of the term male varlet in Troilus and Cressida. See that play, Act V. sc. i. Steevens.²

Still, this read more as confused retreat than defense. It would take two footnotes (one citing the other) for Malone himself to find his ground. Between the two, he established what is for many still the proper line of explanation.

Some part of this indignation might perhaps have been abated, if it had been considered that such addresses to men, however indelicate, were customary in our authour's time, and neither imported criminality, nor were esteemed indecorous. See a note on the words— “thy deceased lover” in the 32d Sonnet. To regulate our judgment of Shakspeare's poems by the modes of modern times, is surely as unreasonable as to try his plays by the rules of Aristotle. Master-mistress does not perhaps mean man-mistress, but sovereign mistress. See Mr. Tyrwhitt's note on the 165th verse of the Canterbury Tales, Vol. IV. P. 197. Malone.³

The phrase “imported criminality” refers to the fact that intimate physical same sex relations were, at that time, quite literally a crime. Among the lower classes the punishments were harsh, generally the death penalty. Among the upper, there was a strict policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell”. Upon the rare failure of that policy, the family lawyers would make excellent money providing alternative explanations before a judge who had better things to do with his professional time.

At that time, there was no considerable question on the matter. The sonnets were records of the poet's life — in particular, his intimate relationships — as was demonstrably the case in virtually every sonnet sequence by every poet.

Still, such phrases as “master mistress of my passion” (and there are more than a few) demanded an explanation. Among the most convenient was the persistent minority opinion that they were not to be interpreted as autobiography.

Was Shakespeare Gay? What do the sonnets really say?

In the year 1817 there appeared fateful book, by one Nathan Drake, entitled Shakespeare and his Times. It was generally well reasoned as any might be that was required to begin from the assumption that they were written by a grain-dealer from Stratford-upon-Avon, and, subsequently, that the earliest were written no earlier than 1597.

His most insupportable assertion, however, was that the first 126 sonnets were to one “lovely boy”. There is no evidence remotely sufficient to support this. A goodly number of the first 126 sonnets are indeed to the same person. The identity of that person disqualifies the Stratford man as the author.

So then, he was correct that the subject of many of the sonnets was clearly a member of the nobility. Combine that fact with the sole member of the nobility associated with the works as interpreted through what little we know of the Stratford biography and voila....

If we may be allowed, in our turn, to conjecture, we would fix upon LORD SOUTHAMPTON as the subject of Shakspeare's sonnets, from the first to the hundredth and twenty-sixth, inclusive.⁴

This is wrong on both counts, I submit, which explains the utter lack of evidence to support them.

This “conjecture” was followed by a discourse expanding Malone's on the use of the word “love(r)” in Tudor and early Stuart correspondence which is by and large correct but not conclusive. And is no explanation for “master mistress of my passion,” etc.

And with that Nathan Drake won the literary history lottery. In short order, the world of Shakespeare scholarship was nearly of one mind. It has only grown moreso since. Even proponents of alternative authorship subscribe to Southampton being the subject of the first 126 sonnets.

Drake's book was a starter's pistol of sorts. Ever since, scores of Shakespeare scholars have spent the centuries writing explanations of the autobiographical references in each sonnet. The Stratford grain-dealer with a modest paper trail has since been revealed to us as a man of aristocratic passions explained by the fact that such genius carries within itself its own inherent sense of nobility. Surely it is only a matter of time before a reference is discovered to his own personal luffa and the jeweled casket in which it accompanied him on his travels.

It had only been a matter of time, after all, before the challenge to the authorship of the Stratford man led to mining the plays, as well, for autobiography. As the result, he gained orders of magnitude more personality. Seeing the danger, Stratfordians have desperately reversed course about the presence of autobiographical material in the works of The Bard. That part of the irrefutable traditional scholarship supporting the Stratford man was no longer irrefutable — nor had it ever been essential in any way to identifying him as the author of the works. Among the poets and playwrights of his day Shakespeare was utterly unique in that his work contains no references whatsoever to his biography — none, at least, that can't be applied to a grain-dealer, glover's son. Again, the inscrutable nature of such genius.

1Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. Was Shakespeare Gay? What do the sonnets really say? (2015). https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TWPBPP8 

2 Malone, ed. Edmond, The Plays and Poems of William Shakspeare, Volume the Tenth. (1790). @ 207.

3 Ibid. @ 207.

4Drake, Nathan. Shakespeare and his Times (1817). II.62.

Also at Virtual Grub Street:

• The Sonnets of Shakespeare: Sonnet 108. Edward de Vere to his son, Henry. “That may expresse my love, or thy deare merit?”

• Sonnet 130: Shakespeare's Reply to a 1580 Poem by Thomas Watson. September 7, 2024. “Interesting to see our Derek Hunter debating with Dennis McCarthy, at the North group,...”.
• Rocco Bonetti's Blackfriars Fencing School and Lord Hunsdon's Water Pipe. August 12, 2023. “... the tenement late in the tenure of John Lyllie gentleman & nowe in the tenure of the said Rocho Bonetti...”

• On Shakespeare's lameness and historical-fiction biography, etc. August 5, 2023. “Those who support Sogliardo of Stratford and other authorship candidates generally stop by from time to time to remark...”

• Check out the Shakespeare Authorship Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
• Check out the Letters Index: Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford for many letters from this fascinating time, some related to the Shakespeare Authorship Question.

Stylistic Matches Between the Poetry of Edward de Vere and Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors.

A bit over a year ago, now, one of the Oxfrauds among us — Mark Johnson, as I recall — revived an old standby among his cohorts regarding a poem by Edward de Vere that appeared in the front matter of his one-time tutor's translation of Cardenas Comfort.

For hee that beates the bushe the byrde not gets.

But who sittes still, and holdeth fast the nets.

These are the final two lines of the poem Edward de Vere donated to the volume, first published in 1573.

This began in the comment thread to a post by group member Kerry Kirk comparing Vere's sometimes rampant alliteration to five lines from Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors. I added that the early Shakespeare play Comedy of Errors is rife with fourteeners, Poulter's Measure and irregular couplets. 

You are on the right track, Kerry. Errors is almost certainly the earliest play in the accepted canon. Many lines in IV.ii. are written in fourteeners, the metrical line preferred by the young Edward de Vere and the similarity with his juvenal poems is striking.

It is by no means the only early play by Shakespeare or poem by Edward de Vere that include such matter.

I posted a reply shortly thereafter entitled “To D.W.R. In re the 'Frauds and Beating the Bush with Young Shakespeare” in which I pointed out two things:

1) The poem was a revision of an earlier poem by Vere, collected by Richard Edwards, master of the Children of the Royal Chapel, who died in 1566. Presumably, then, it was written when he was 16 years of age or younger. The original was written in the Poulter's Measure that was highly popular at the time. The 1573 version was converted into iambic pentameter. As in most such cases (and there are many), the conversion took something away from the quality of the verse.

2) That beating the bush and losing the bird was even then an old and highly popular proverb. My essay shows examples of its use in the writings of Rabelais and Edmund Spenser.

None of this received reply. In particular, Mr. Johnson continued as if neither Kerry nor I had so much as mentioned the Comedy of Errors.

My essay was posted again, recently, in the normal rotation at Edward de Vere Was Shakespeare Facebook Group. As always, in the comment thread, Johnson waxed glorious in his confidence that Shakespeare could not ever have written such a thing at any age.

Sing-song, immature, amateur verse, lacking in anyfigures of speech, cliched, full of excessive alliteration serving noaesthetic purpose (in the mid-century style he was accustomed to),clumsy scansion, simplistic language, etc. — hackneyed doggerel.

The collective 'Fraud yawp is that Shakespeare would never have written such doggerel and certainly not at 23 years of age. “Doggerel,” he triumphantly cried, “500, 1000 miles, a world away from Shakespeare.”

As it turns out, I am in-progress on my next book-length study, which will address at length, among other matters, the history and text of the Comedy of Errors. So then, I can justify taking precious time away for this particular post. For it is not time away.

The following swatch from Act III, Scene i, is a representative example for present purposes.

Ant. E. What art thou that keep'st me out from the house I owe?

Dro. S. [ Within.] The porter for this time, sir, and my name is Dromio.

Dro. E. O villain, thou hast stolen both mine office and my name!

The one ne'er got me credit, the other mickle blame.

If thou hadst been Dromio to-day in my place,

Thou wouldst have changed thy face for a name, or thy name for a face.

Luce. [ Within.'] What a coil is there, Dromio? who are those at the gate?

Dro. E. Let my master in, Luce.

Luce.                             [ Within.] 'Faith no; he comes too late;

And so tell your master.

Dro. E.                         O Lord! I must laugh!

Have at you with a proverb;—Shall I set in my staff?

Luce. [ Within.] Have at you with another: that 's—When? can you tell?

Dro. S. [Within!] If thy name be called Luce, — Luce, thou hast answered him well.

Ant. E. Do you hear, you minion? you'll let us in, I trow?

Luce. [ Within.] I thought to have asked you.

Dro. S.                        [Within.] And you said, no.

Dro. E. So; come, help: well struck! there was blow for blow.

Ant. E. Thou baggage, let me in.

Luce.                          [ Within.] Can you tell for whose sake?

Dro. E. Master, knock the door hard.

Luce.                          [ Within.] Let him knock till it ache.

Ant. E. You'll cry for this, minion, if I beat the door down.

Luce. [ Within.] What needs all that, and a pair of stocks in the town?

Adr. [ Within!] Who is that at the door, that keeps all this noise?

Dro. S. [ Within.] By my troth, your town is troubled with unruly boys.

Ant. E. Are you there, wife? you might have come before.

Adr. [Within.] Your wife, sir knave? go get you from the door.

These lines are largely written in iambic hexameter, fourteeners and poulter's measure. Elsewhere in the play are prose and iambic pentameter lines apparently transformed from originals in poulter's measure and also described by scholars over the centuries as “doggerel”. Lines in each meter, throughout Errors, contain word inversions as does Edward's poem at the front of Cardenus Comfort.

Comedy of Errors is also strewn throughout with popular proverbs of the times many which presumably went back centuries. In the manner of “he who beats the bush” we find:

many a man hath more hair than wit.

Shall I set in my staff?

When? can you tell?

he must have a long spoon that must eat with the devil.

It seems that the early writings of Edward de Vere and of Shakespeare have a remarkable amount in common.

Also at Virtual Grub Street:

• Sonnet 130: Shakespeare's Reply to a 1580 Poem by Thomas Watson. September 7, 2024. “Interesting to see our Derek Hunter debating with Dennis McCarthy, at the North group,...”.
• Rocco Bonetti's Blackfriars Fencing School and Lord Hunsdon's Water Pipe. August 12, 2023. “... the tenement late in the tenure of John Lyllie gentleman & nowe in the tenure of the said Rocho Bonetti...”

• On Shakespeare's lameness and historical-fiction biography, etc. August 5, 2023. “Those who support Sogliardo of Stratford and other authorship candidates generally stop by from time to time to remark...”

• Shakespeare CSI: Sir Thomas More, Hand-D. April 22, 2023. “What a glory to have an actual hand-written manuscript from the greatest English writer of all time!”
• Check out the Shakespeare Authorship Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
• Check out the Letters Index: Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford for many letters from this fascinating time, some related to the Shakespeare Authorship Question.

The Sonnets of Shakespeare: Sonnet 108. Edward de Vere to his son, Henry.

 

108

WHat’s in the braine that Inck may character,

Which hath not figur’d to thee my true spirit,

What’s new to speake, what now to register,

That may expresse my love, or thy deare merit?

Nothing sweet boy, but yet like prayers divine,

I must each day say ore the very same,

Counting no old thing old, thou mine, I thine,

Even as when first I hallowed thy faire name.

So that eternall love in loves fresh case,

Waighes not the dust and injury of age,

Nor gives to necessary wrinckles place,

But makes antiquitie for aye his page,

Finding the first conceit of love there bred,

Where time and outward forme would shew it dead.

1. character] Schmidt (1874): Write, inscribe.

3. new . .. now] Malone (ed. 1780) emended to new . . . new

5. sweet boy] The only use of this phrase in the sonnets (but compare my lovely Boy, 126.1, and my sweet'st friend, 133.4).—Horace Davis (in Alden, ed. 1916)

8. [Neil (Ath., Apr. 27, 1867, p. 552) finds here a suggestion that this sonnet was addressed to the poet's son Hamnet; in which he is followed by Goedeke (Rundschau, 10: 407). If this be ingenious, it pales before the suggestion of Mrs. Stopes that the word "hallowed" alludes to the first time the friend was addressed as "Hal," or that of W. Underhill ( N. &Q., 7th s., 9: 227), who regards it as a pun on the name of a supposed W. Hall. The use of the word is due, of course, to the figure of the liturgy in lines 6-7. "Every morning since I began to worship you I have continued to say, 'Hallowed be thy name.'"] — Alden.

9. in . .. case] Malone (ed. 1780): By the case of love the poet means his own compositions. —Beeching: Such is love's fresh case, its state of always being fresh. [This interpretation of Beeching's I think is undoubtedly right; cf. "fresh" in 107, 10, where the word means, not new, but as good as new. Schmidt gives numerous instances of "case" in the meaning of state or condition.] — Alden

10. Waighes] Steevens (ed. 1780) explains as “cares for.” So Schmidt (1875).—Onions (1911): Attaches value to.

11. wrinckles] —Butler (ed. 1899, pp. 246, 250) found here and in 104 evidence of literal wrinkles on the friend’s fair brow.

12. ] —Brooke (ed. 1936): Turns old age into a schoolboy. [Here the meanings of both "antiquity" and "page" are rather curiously disputed. —Schmidt defines the former as "old age," (cf. 62, 10); —Tyler, as "the appearance of the beloved one in that olden time when the attachment commenced," followed substantially by Rolfe; —Wyndham, "the praise of ladies dead and lovely knights" by the "antique pen" of earlier generations. —Alden: Schmidt I think is undoubtedly right; "old age" is the more common Shakespearean meaning, and certainly pertinent to this quatrain. As for "page," Tyler apparently understands it as the page of a book, since he paraphrases " Ever sets before him the appearance," etc.; and he is followed by Miss Porter and Mrs. Stopes, the former commenting, "As of a page in a prayer-book for repetition forever," the latter, "Puts the mark in Life's book, at the old story of first love." I understand Wyndham to take the same view, though he does not make it perfectly clear. On the other hand, Beeching, in paraphrasing, "Love . . . never sees the workings of antiquity, which is always in its rear," seems to imply the image of a page following in the train of Love; (here, unfortunately, one cannot be certain just what is understood by "antiquity"). It argues against the former interpretation that Sh., despite his abundant mention of books, never (unless here) uses the word "page" in that connection, but always "leaf"; with the meaning "servant," on the other hand, it is very familiar. —Alden: I believe, therefore, that the line means simply, "makes old age his servant," instead of yielding it the mastery;

13. 14.] —Dowden (ed. 1881): Finding the first conception of love, i.e., love as passionate as at first, excited by one whose years and outward form show the effects of age.—Pooler (ed. 1918): The meaning may be—finding the first conception of love, i. e. the old love reborn, in eyes that are bright no longer, or it may be more general—finding love as young as ever in those who no longer have youth and the freshness of youth.

—Rendall (ed 1930, p. 252): ...we shall assign Sonnets 108‐125 to the months following the death of Elizabeth in March 1603, and place the termination of the whole series before 1604.

I offer the following prose redaction of the sonnet. Of course, I agree with Samuel Neil that the sonnet is written to Shakespeare's son. Just not the son of the Stratford man. Vere's son was born in 1593 and he had to wonder — given his seriously declining health during the mid to late 1590s — whether he would survive long enough for his son to get to know him. With this for context, the sonnet makes perfect sense. He reflects that his son would know him unusually well through his plays and poems. So then, I assign this sonnet to the mid to late 1590s. No later than 1604.

While I cannot assert the pun Ms. Stopes sees on “hallowed,” with confidence, Vere's son was named “Hal” (Henry). Shakespeare clearly identified with Henry V whose friends in the play call him “Hal.” More than a few critics have suspected a double entendre on the word “page” in line 12, myself among them.

Lines 1-2] What can the brain reveal through ink that I do not leave to you so you may know me?

Lines 3-4] What more could be said, what more written, to express my love or pride in you?

Lines 5-6] Nothing, sweet boy. But still I must repeat my words like reciting prayers.

Lines 7-8] Rejecting no theme for being old. You mine, I yours, even as first I hallowed your name [at your christening].

Lines 9-10] So that love, eternal, remains forever young, does not grow dust-laden or lame with age

Lines 11-12] Nor wrinkled with the passage of years but turns the past into its page [double entendre]

Lines 13-14] finding the first feelings of love bred there when time will bring my body dead.

Sources:

Alden, Raymond MacDonald. The Sonnets of Shakespeare... with variorum readings (1916).

Butler, Samuel. Sh.'s Sonnets, reconsidered and in part rearranged (1899).

Dowden, Edward. 1881. Sonnets of W. Sh. (1881).

Malone, Edmund. Steevens, George. Supplement to the edition of Sh.'s Plays published in 1778 (1780).

Neil, Samuel. (Ath., April 27, 1867, p. 552)

Rendall, Gerald H. Shakespeare Sonnets And Edward De Vere (1930).

Rollins, Hyder Edwards. A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Sonnets (1944).

Schmidt, Alexander. Shakespeare Lexicon (1875).

Stopes, C. C. Sh.'s Sonnets. (1904).

Wyndham, George. Poems of Sh. (1898).

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