The Portrait of Mr. W. H.

Chapter 2

It was past twelve o'clock when I awoke, and the sun was streaming

in through the curtains of my room in long slanting beams of dusty

gold. I told my servant that I would be at home to no one; and

after I had had a cup of chocolate and a petit-pain, I took down

from the book-shelf my copy of Shakespeare's Sonnets, and began to

go carefully through them. Every poem seemed to me to corroborate

Cyril Graham's theory. I felt as if I had my hand upon

Shakespeare's heart, and was counting each separate throb and pulse

of passion. I thought of the wonderful boy-actor, and saw his face

in every line.

Two sonnets, I remember, struck me particularly: they were the 53rd

and the 67th. In the first of these, Shakespeare, complimenting

Willie Hughes on the versatility of his acting, on his wide range of

parts, a range extending from Rosalind to Juliet, and from Beatrice

to Ophelia, says to him -

What is your substance, whereof are you made,

That millions of strange shadows on you tend?

Since every one hath, every one, one shade,

And you, but one, can every shadow lend -

lines that would be unintelligible if they were not addressed to an

actor, for the word 'shadow' had in Shakespeare's day a technical

meaning connected with the stage. 'The best in this kind are but

shadows,' says Theseus of the actors in the Midsummer Night's Dream,

and there are many similar allusions in the literature of the day.

These sonnets evidently belonged to the series in which Shakespeare

discusses the nature of the actor's art, and of the strange and rare

temperament that is essential to the perfect stage-player. 'How is

it,' says Shakespeare to Willie Hughes, 'that you have so many

personalities?' and then he goes on to point out that his beauty is

such that it seems to realise every form and phase of fancy, to

embody each dream of the creative imagination--an idea that is still

further expanded in the sonnet that immediately follows, where,

beginning with the fine thought,

O, how much more doth beauty beauteous seem

By that sweet ornament which TRUTH doth give!

Shakespeare invites us to notice how the truth of acting, the truth

of visible presentation on the stage, adds to the wonder of poetry,

giving life to its loveliness, and actual reality to its ideal form.

And yet, in the 67th Sonnet, Shakespeare calls upon Willie Hughes to

abandon the stage with its artificiality, its false mimic life of

painted face and unreal costume, its immoral influences and

suggestions, its remoteness from the true world of noble action and

sincere utterance.

Ah, wherefore with infection should he live

And with his presence grace impiety,

That sin by him advantage should achieve

And lace itself with his society?

Why should false painting imitate his cheek,

And steal dead seeming of his living hue?

Why should poor beauty indirectly seek

Roses of shadow, since his rose is true?

It may seem strange that so great a dramatist as Shakespeare, who

realised his own perfection as an artist and his humanity as a man

on the ideal plane of stage-writing and stage-playing, should have

written in these terms about the theatre; but we must remember that

in Sonnets CX. and CXI. Shakespeare shows us that he too was wearied

of the world of puppets, and full of shame at having made himself 'a

motley to the view.' The 111th Sonnet is especially bitter:-

O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide,

The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,

That did not better for my life provide

Than public means which public manners breeds.

Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,

And almost thence my nature is subdued

To what it works in, like the dyer's hand:

Pity me then and wish I were renew'd -

and there are many signs elsewhere of the same feeling, signs

familiar to all real students of Shakespeare.

One point puzzled me immensely as I read the Sonnets, and it was

days before I struck on the true interpretation, which indeed Cyril

Graham himself seems to have missed. I could not understand how it

was that Shakespeare set so high a value on his young friend

marrying. He himself had married young, and the result had been

unhappiness, and it was not likely that he would have asked Willie

Hughes to commit the same error. The boy-player of Rosalind had

nothing to gain from marriage, or from the passions of real life.

The early sonnets, with their strange entreaties to have children,

seemed to me a jarring note. The explanation of the mystery came on

me quite suddenly, and I found it in the curious dedication. It

will be remembered that the dedication runs as follows:-

TO THE ONLIE BEGETTER OF

THESE INSUING SONNETS

MR. W. H. ALL HAPPINESSE

AND THAT ETERNITIE

PROMISED

BY

OUR EVER-LIVING POET

WISHETH

THE WELL-WISHING

ADVENTURER IN

SETTING

FORTH.

T. T.

Some scholars have supposed that the word 'begetter' in this

dedication means simply the procurer of the Sonnets for Thomas

Thorpe the publisher; but this view is now generally abandoned, and

the highest authorities are quite agreed that it is to be taken in

the sense of inspirer, the metaphor being drawn from the analogy of

physical life. Now I saw that the same metaphor was used by

Shakespeare himself all through the poems, and this set me on the

right track. Finally I made my great discovery. The marriage that

Shakespeare proposes for Willie Hughes is the marriage with his

Muse, an expression which is definitely put forward in the 82nd

Sonnet, where, in the bitterness of his heart at the defection of

the boy-actor for whom he had written his greatest parts, and whose

beauty had indeed suggested them, he opens his complaint by saying -

I grant thou wert not married to my Muse.

The children he begs him to beget are no children of flesh and

blood, but more immortal children of undying fame. The whole cycle

of the early sonnets is simply Shakespeare's invitation to Willie

Hughes to go upon the stage and become a player. How barren and

profitless a thing, he says, is this beauty of yours if it be not

used:-

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow

And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field,

Thy youth's proud livery, so gazed on now,

Will be a tatter'd weed, of small worth held:

Then being ask'd where all thy beauty lies,

Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,

To say, within thine own deep-sunken eyes,

Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.

You must create something in art: my verse 'is thine, and BORN of

thee'; only listen to me, and I will 'BRING FORTH eternal numbers to

outlive long date,' and you shall people with forms of your own

image the imaginary world of the stage. These children that you

beget, he continues, will not wither away, as mortal children do,

but you shall live in them and in my plays: do but -

Make thee another self, for love of me,

That beauty still may live in thine or thee.

I collected all the passages that seemed to me to corroborate this

view, and they produced a strong impression on me, and showed me how

complete Cyril Graham's theory really was. I also saw that it was

quite easy to separate those lines in which he speaks of the Sonnets

themselves from those in which he speaks of his great dramatic work.

This was a point that had been entirely overlooked by all critics up

to Cyril Graham's day. And yet it was one of the most important

points in the whole series of poems. To the Sonnets Shakespeare was

more or less indifferent. He did not wish to rest his fame on them.

They were to him his 'slight Muse,' as he calls them, and intended,

as Meres tells us, for private circulation only among a few, a very

few, friends. Upon the other hand he was extremely conscious of the

high artistic value of his plays, and shows a noble self-reliance

upon his dramatic genius. When he says to Willie Hughes:

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;

Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,

When in ETERNAL LINES to time thou grow'st:

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee; -

the expression 'eternal lines' clearly alludes to one of his plays

that he was sending him at the time, just as the concluding couplet

points to his confidence in the probability of his plays being

always acted. In his address to the Dramatic Muse (Sonnets C. and

CI.), we find the same feeling.

Where art thou, Muse, that thou forget'st so long

To speak of that which gives thee all thy might?

Spend'st thou thy fury on some worthless song,

Darkening thy power to lend base subjects light?

he cries, and he then proceeds to reproach the Mistress of Tragedy

and Comedy for her 'neglect of Truth in Beauty dyed,' and says -

Because he needs no praise, wilt thou be dumb?

Excuse not silence so, for 't lies in thee

To make him much outlive a gilded tomb

And to be praised of ages yet to be.

Then do thy office, Muse; I teach thee how

To make him seem long hence as he shows now.

It is, however, perhaps in the 55th Sonnet that Shakespeare gives to

this idea its fullest expression. To imagine that the 'powerful

rhyme' of the second line refers to the sonnet itself, is to mistake

Shakespeare's meaning entirely. It seemed to me that it was

extremely likely, from the general character of the sonnet, that a

particular play was meant, and that the play was none other but

Romeo and Juliet.

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments

Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;

But you shall shine more bright in these contents

Than unswept stone besmear'd with sluttish time.

When wasteful wars shall statues overturn,

And broils root out the work of masonry,

Nor Mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burn

The living record of your memory.

'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity

Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room

Even in the eyes of all posterity

That wear this world out to the ending doom.

So, till the judgement that yourself arise,

You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes.

It was also extremely suggestive to note how here as elsewhere

Shakespeare promised Willie Hughes immortality in a form that

appealed to men's eyes--that is to say, in a spectacular form, in a

play that is to be looked at.

For two weeks I worked hard at the Sonnets, hardly ever going out,

and refusing all invitations. Every day I seemed to be discovering

something new, and Willie Hughes became to me a kind of spiritual

presence, an ever-dominant personality. I could almost fancy that I

saw him standing in the shadow of my room, so well had Shakespeare

drawn him, with his golden hair, his tender flower-like grace, his

dreamy deep-sunken eyes, his delicate mobile limbs, and his white

lily hands. His very name fascinated me. Willie Hughes! Willie

Hughes! How musically it sounded! Yes; who else but he could have

been the master-mistress of Shakespeare's passion, {1} the lord of

his love to whom he was bound in vassalage, {2} the delicate minion

of pleasure, {3} the rose of the whole world, {4} the herald of the

spring {5} decked in the proud livery of youth, {6} the lovely boy

whom it was sweet music to hear, {7} and whose beauty was the very

raiment of Shakespeare's heart, {8} as it was the keystone of his

dramatic power? How bitter now seemed the whole tragedy of his

desertion and his shame!--shame that he made sweet and lovely {9} by

the mere magic of his personality, but that was none the less shame.

Yet as Shakespeare forgave him, should not we forgive him also? I

did not care to pry into the mystery of his sin.

His abandonment of Shakespeare's theatre was a different matter, and

I investigated it at great length. Finally I came to the conclusion

that Cyril Graham had been wrong in regarding the rival dramatist of

the 80th Sonnet as Chapman. It was obviously Marlowe who was

alluded to. At the time the Sonnets were written, such an

expression as 'the proud full sail of his great verse' could not

have been used of Chapman's work, however applicable it might have

been to the style of his later Jacobean plays. No: Marlowe was

clearly the rival dramatist of whom Shakespeare spoke in such

laudatory terms; and that

Affable familiar ghost

Which nightly gulls him with intelligence,

was the Mephistopheles of his Doctor Faustus. No doubt, Marlowe was

fascinated by the beauty and grace of the boy-actor, and lured him

away from the Blackfriars Theatre, that he might play the Gaveston

of his Edward II. That Shakespeare had the legal right to retain

Willie Hughes in his own company is evident from Sonnet LXXXVII.,

where he says:-

Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing,

And like enough thou know'st thy estimate:

The CHARTER OF THY WORTH gives thee releasing;

My BONDS in thee are all determinate.

For how do I hold thee but by thy granting?

And for that riches where is my deserving?

The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting,

AND SO MY PATENT BACK AGAIN IS SWERVING.

Thyself thou gayest, thy own worth then not knowing,

Or me, to whom thou gavest it, else mistaking;

So thy great gift, upon misprision growing,

Comes home again, on better judgement making.

Thus have I had thee, as a dream doth flatter,

In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.

But him whom he could not hold by love, he would not hold by force.

Willie Hughes became a member of Lord Pembroke's company, and,

perhaps in the open yard of the Red Bull Tavern, played the part of

King Edward's delicate minion. On Marlowe's death, he seems to have

returned to Shakespeare, who, whatever his fellow-partners may have

thought of the matter, was not slow to forgive the wilfulness and

treachery of the young actor.

How well, too, had Shakespeare drawn the temperament of the stage-

player! Willie Hughes was one of those

That do not do the thing they most do show,

Who, moving others, are themselves as stone.

He could act love, but could not feel it, could mimic passion

without realising it.

In many's looks the false heart's history

Is writ in moods and frowns and wrinkles strange,

but with Willie Hughes it was not so. 'Heaven,' says Shakespeare,

in a sonnet of mad idolatry -

Heaven in thy creation did decree

That in thy face sweet love should ever dwell;

Whate'er thy thoughts or thy heart's workings be,

Thy looks should nothing thence but sweetness tell.

In his 'inconstant mind' and his 'false heart,' it was easy to

recognise the insincerity and treachery that somehow seem

inseparable from the artistic nature, as in his love of praise that

desire for immediate recognition that characterises all actors. And

yet, more fortunate in this than other actors, Willie Hughes was to

know something of immortality. Inseparably connected with

Shakespeare's plays, he was to live in them.

Your name from hence immortal life shall have,

Though I, once gone, to all the world must die:

The earth can yield me but a common grave,

When you entombed in men's eyes shall lie.

Your monument shall be my gentle verse,

Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read,

And tongues to be your being shall rehearse,

When all the breathers of this world are dead.

There were endless allusions, also, to Willie Hughes's power over

his audience--the 'gazers,' as Shakespeare calls them; but perhaps

the most perfect description of his wonderful mastery over dramatic

art was in A Lover's Complaint, where Shakespeare says of him:-

In him a plenitude of subtle matter,

Applied to cautels, all strange forms receives,

Of burning blushes, or of weeping water,

Or swooning paleness; and he takes and leaves,

In either's aptness, as it best deceives,

To blush at speeches rank, to weep at woes,

Or to turn white and swoon at tragic shows.

* * * * * * * *

So on the tip of his subduing tongue,

All kind of arguments and questions deep,

All replication prompt and reason strong,

For his advantage still did wake and sleep,

To make the weeper laugh, the laugher weep.

He had the dialect and the different skill,

Catching all passions in his craft of will.

Once I thought that I had really found Willie Hughes in Elizabethan

literature. In a wonderfully graphic account of the last days of

the great Earl of Essex, his chaplain, Thomas Knell, tells us that

the night before the Earl died, 'he called William Hewes, which was

his musician, to play upon the virginals and to sing. "Play," said

he, "my song, Will Hewes, and I will sing it to myself." So he did

it most joyfully, not as the howling swan, which, still looking

down, waileth her end, but as a sweet lark, lifting up his hands and

casting up his eyes to his God, with this mounted the crystal skies,

and reached with his unwearied tongue the top of highest heavens.'

Surely the boy who played on the virginals to the dying father of

Sidney's Stella was none other but the Will Hews to whom Shakespeare

dedicated the Sonnets, and who he tells us was himself sweet 'music

to hear.' Yet Lord Essex died in 1576, when Shakespeare himself was

but twelve years of age. It was impossible that his musician could

have been the Mr. W. H. of the Sonnets. Perhaps Shakespeare's young

friend was the son of the player upon the virginals? It was at

least something to have discovered that Will Hews was an Elizabethan

name. Indeed the name Hews seemed to have been closely connected

with music and the stage. The first English actress was the lovely

Margaret Hews, whom Prince Rupert so madly loved. What more

probable than that between her and Lord Essex's musician had come

the boy-actor of Shakespeare's plays? But the proofs, the links--

where were they? Alas! I could not find them. It seemed to me that

I was always on the brink of absolute verification, but that I could

never really attain to it.

From Willie Hughes's life I soon passed to thoughts of his death. I

used to wonder what had been his end.

Perhaps he had been one of those English actors who in 1604 went

across sea to Germany and played before the great Duke Henry Julius

of Brunswick, himself a dramatist of no mean order, and at the Court

of that strange Elector of Brandenburg, who was so enamoured of

beauty that he was said to have bought for his weight in amber the

young son of a travelling Greek merchant, and to have given pageants

in honour of his slave all through that dreadful famine year of

1606-7, when the people died of hunger in the very streets of the

town, and for the space of seven months there was no rain. We know

at any rate that Romeo and Juliet was brought out at Dresden in

1613, along with Hamlet and King Lear, and it was surely to none

other than Willie Hughes that in 1615 the death-mask of Shakespeare

was brought by the hand of one of the suite of the English

ambassador, pale token of the passing away of the great poet who had

so dearly loved him. Indeed there would have been something

peculiarly fitting in the idea that the boy-actor, whose beauty had

been so vital an element in the realism and romance of Shakespeare's

art, should have been the first to have brought to Germany the seed

of the new culture, and was in his way the precursor of that

Aufklarung or Illumination of the eighteenth century, that splendid

movement which, though begun by Lessing and Herder, and brought to

its full and perfect issue by Goethe, was in no small part helped on

by another actor--Friedrich Schroeder--who awoke the popular

consciousness, and by means of the feigned passions and mimetic

methods of the stage showed the intimate, the vital, connection

between life and literature. If this was so--and there was

certainly no evidence against it--it was not improbable that Willie

Hughes was one of those English comedians (mimae quidam ex

Britannia, as the old chronicle calls them), who were slain at

Nuremberg in a sudden uprising of the people, and were secretly

buried in a little vineyard outside the city by some young men 'who

had found pleasure in their performances, and of whom some had

sought to be instructed in the mysteries of the new art.' Certainly

no more fitting place could there be for him to whom Shakespeare

said, 'thou art all my art,' than this little vineyard outside the

city walls. For was it not from the sorrows of Dionysos that

Tragedy sprang? Was not the light laughter of Comedy, with its

careless merriment and quick replies, first heard on the lips of the

Sicilian vine-dressers? Nay, did not the purple and red stain of

the wine-froth on face and limbs give the first suggestion of the

charm and fascination of disguise--the desire for self-concealment,

the sense of the value of objectivity thus showing itself in the

rude beginnings of the art? At any rate, wherever he lay--whether

in the little vineyard at the gate of the Gothic town, or in some

dim London churchyard amidst the roar and bustle of our great city--

no gorgeous monument marked his resting-place. His true tomb, as

Shakespeare saw, was the poet's verse, his true monument the

permanence of the drama. So had it been with others whose beauty

had given a new creative impulse to their age. The ivory body of

the Bithynian slave rots in the green ooze of the Nile, and on the

yellow hills of the Cerameicus is strewn the dust of the young

Athenian; but Antinous lives in sculpture, and Charmides in

philosophy.