The identity of the volume’s dedicatee, “MR. W. H.,” has been the cause of much enquiry and speculation. Generally research has focussed on the two most likely candidates, Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, and William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke. Earlier commentators advanced the cause of Southampton, even though his initials are reversed, basing their case principally on the fact that Shakespeare had in 1594 dedicated his two verse works, Venus and Adonis and Lucrece to him and on the assumption that the sonnets were written in the early-mid 1590s. More recent scholarship, however, has tended to discount Southampton’s candidacy and to advance that of Pembroke. Hieatt and Jackson’s refined stylometric work and statistical analysis have helped shape a consensus as to when the sonnets were composed later than the period of the early-mid 1590s. Katherine Duncan-Jones has determined that the balance of evidence points to the Earl of Pembroke:
If some of the ‘fair youth’ sonnets, or versions of them, were written as early as 1592- 5, these may indeed have been originally associated with Southampton, dedicatee of the narrative poems in 1593 and 1594. But as completed and published in 1609 the sequence strongly invites a reference to Pembroke. 22
Duncan-Jones argues that Sonnets 107 and 123-125 contain allusions to events that occurred during the period 1603-04. She is, I think, right about the period but not about all the events. Sonnet 107 makes reference to the death of Elizabeth (“the mortal moon hath her eclipse endurred”) and to the new imperial peace brought about by the accession of James, who united the three tribes of England, Scotland and Wales and who was anointed with balm at his Coronation on 25 July 1603. Sonnet 123 alludes to the pyramids erected during 1603-04 as part of the triumphal arches built to celebrate the royal procession celebrating James I’s coronation, which was postponed because of the plague until the Ides of March, 15 March 1604. Sonnet 124’s indictment of the “foles of time” alludes to events and plotters involved in the Catholic “Bye” and “Main” plots of June-December 1603, about which there was frequent rumour and report as the conspirators were moved about the country, finally to be tried (and some executed) in Winchester.
It is, however, Sonnet 125 that is pivotal in narrowing the field of potential candidates to two, Henry Wriothesley and William Herbert. Sonnet 125 contrasts two liturgical functions. Its opening question, “Wer’t it ought to me I bore the canopy,” (‘Would it have meant anything to me, if I had borne the canopy?’) dismisses the office as an outward one, unimportant to the poet, although possibly important to someone else who had borne a canopy. The poet contrasts this external role with his interior act of pure oblation that “knows no art, / But mutuall render, onely me for thee,” which is identified in the sonnet with the central Eucharistic commercium (see Sonnet 125 for further commentary).
Canopies had been a regular feature of processions in pre-reformation liturgical services, particularly in processions of the Host (the word derived from Canopeum quod suspenditur super altare, a canopy suspended over an altar on which oblations were offered). After the Reformation the liturgical practice of using a canopy especially with the Eucharist, had been proscribed, although they were used in courtly rituals and processions. There was, however, a single occasion, when, through a combination of circumstances, a canopy was used in the oblatory setting of a Eucharistic Service and that was at the Coronation of a Monarch, because the Coronation Rite was not a rite in isolation but was always interpolated into a Eucharistic Service, a rubric laid down by the Liber Regalis of 1382. James I insisted on using the ancient rite. So also had Elizabeth I, who even retained the Latin; James for the occasion had it Englished. Controversy surrounded his choice and particularly his further insistence that the Rite of Enunction or Anointing be included, even moderate divines finding liturgical anointings doctrinally distasteful. (Anointing with oil had been eliminated from all the Reformed rites of the Church of England, including Baptism, Confirmation, Visiting the Sick, and the Ordering of Deacons and Priests and Consecration of Bishops.) Giovanni Scaramelli, the Venetian Secretary to England, reported on 4 June 1603:
The question of the Coronation is coming up. The anointing has always been performed by a Catholic Bishop and with the Catholic rite, both in the case of Edward VI. and also of Elizabeth, although Protestants. . . As anointing is a function appointed by God to mark the pre-eminence of Kings it cannot well be omitted, and they cannot make up their minds what expedient they should adopt. The people loath the priestly benediction be it in oil or in water, nor do they admit the sign of the cross except in baptism. The King is an ardent upholder of these objections, and he says that neither he nor any other King can have power to heal scrofula, for the age of miracles is past, and God alone can work them. However he will have the full ceremony. 23
Scaramelli explains that the King’s requirement of a “full ceremony” including anointing was both because his protestant predecessors, Edward and Elizabeth, had used the ritual and because he did not want to jeopardize his claim to be King of France, the French monarch being constituted King through anointing (“so as not to loose this prerogative, which belongs to the Kings of England as Kings of France”). 24 Since oils were no longer consecrated in Maundy Thursday’s Mass of Chrism, the oil was not immediately available and was sourced from an old stock; Scaramelli again explains: “The ointment was taken from a vase, enclosed in a goblet, and covered with a white cloth, standing on the altar along with other regalia. They say the oil was consecrated long ago, and is kept in the Tower of London. It served to anoint both Edward the Sixth and Elizabeth, both of them Protestants.” 25
At the Coronation on the Feast of St. James (the Liber Regalis laid down that the coronation should occur “some Sunday or Holy-Day”), 26 the King processed to Westminster Abbey, preceded by the Garter “king-at-arms . . acting as master of ceremonies.” 27 The ceremony opened with the Communion Service, which continued until the Creed and included as its Epistle the words from 1 Pet. 2.16-17, “As free [men], and not hauyng the libertie for a cloke of maliciousnes . . Honor all men . . Honor the King.” The first interpolated ritual was the Enunction, when the Archbishop anointed the King’s hands with the invocation, “Let these hands by anoynted, as Kings and Prophets have been anoynted,” and subsequently his breast, between his shoulders, both his shoulders, both his elbows and his head. 28 While being anointed he was hidden from view under a canopy held by four Knights of the Garter, who had been chosen and awarded by their companions the privilege of holding the canopy or golden pall over the sovereign’s head. (“Four Knights of the Garter shall hold a rich pall of silk or canopy of gold”). 29 They had been chosen by vote at the Knights’ Annual Chapter on the Eve of the Feast of St. George, Saturday 2 July 1603. James had earlier installed five new Knights, including Henry, Prince of Wales, two Scottish Knights, and two English Knights, the Earl of Southampton and the Earl of Pembroke. The Knights of the Garter never number more than 24 and in James’ time included a number of non-Englishmen. (For their Chapter in 1603 the voting for Southampton and Pembroke was split 3-3, only six Knights voting.) It was from a reduced number, including Southampton and Pembroke, that four were chosen to bear the canopy. 30 Since the four Knights were elected from a total of ten available, either or both Southampton and Pembroke are the only possible candidates for “MR. W. H.,” who could have been elected to bear the canopy over the King during the Rite of Anointing.
After other rituals, including the Crowning and the Enthroning, the Coronation section concluded with the Homage, during which “the Earls, Council, and Barons, one by one, kissed the King’s hand, kneeling before him on a red brocaded cushion, and touched the crown, some even kissing it.” Scaramelli singles out one particular episode during the Homage featuring William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke, whose actions stood out because they extended beyond the bounds of propriety:
The Earl of Pembroke, a handsome youth, who is always with the King and always joking with him, actually kissed his Majesty’s face, whereupon the King laughed and gave him a little cuff. (Et fra questi il Conte di Pembruch, giovane gratioso et che sta sempre col Rè et su i scherzi, basciò anco la faccia a Sua Maestà, che si pose a rider el [sic] gli diede un sciaffetto. 31
Kissing the Monarch’s cheek was rubrically reserved to the Monarch’s spouse, who “shall touch the Crown upon his Majesty’s head and kiss his Majesty’s left cheek,” and the celebrating Archbishop and the clergy who “kissed the Kings left cheek.” 32
The Communion Service then resumed with the oblation of the bread and wine but with the additional “Oblation of a Pall” by the King, which was laid on the altar and followed by the prayer, “we humbly beseech thee most mercifully to accept these oblations.” At the Communion itself Scaramelli notes “the King approached the altar, and . . received the Lord’s supper in bread and wine out of the chalice, which had been borne before him. The Queen did not receive the Sacrament.” 33
Sonnet 125, then, restricts the number of candidates, who might have borne a canopy in a Eucharistic setting to two, Henry Wriothesley and William Herbert. Of the two Henry Wriothesley would seem eliminated from contention, because the events to which Sonnet 107 and the final sonnets to the youth allude fall in the period 1603-04, when Wriothesley was already in his thirties (he was born in 1573) and scarcely young. As well, if he were “MR. W. H.,” the sequence’s initial sonnets urging the youth to marry must have been written before 1595, when Southampton began his intrigue with Elizabeth Vernon, which ended in a rushed marriage in 1598, with which Elizabeth was so displeased she had the parties confined in Fleet prison. As Jackson succinctly concludes, “If I am correct in thinking that the ‘marriage sonnets’ are no earlier than the second half of the 1590s, they cannot have been commissioned to overcome any reluctance of Henry Wriothesley, earl of Southampton, to marry.” 34
The case for William Herbert, on the other hand, is compelling. Born in 1580 he was the older son of the second Earl of Pembroke and Mary, Countess of Pembroke, the sister of Sir Philip and Sir Robert Sidney. He succeeded to the title on 19 January 1601 on the death of his father, a well-known supporter of the theatre and for a short period from 1594 patron of “Pembroke’s Men,” a company of actors. Mary, Countess of Pembroke, was renowned for her own literary accomplishments (she completed a translation of the psalms that Philip Sidney had begun) and for her support of poets (Thomas Churchyard in 1593 acclaims her “wise Minervaes wit” and records that she “sets to schoole, our poets eu’ry where”). 35 William Herbert was first sent to New College, Oxford in 1593 and subsequently to court where he distinguished himself early as a fine courtier (Rowland Whyte, the agent in London of Sir Robert Sidney who was in Holland, reports to him on 12 September 1599 that “My Lord Harbert is a continuall Courtier,” on 25 November that, “My Lord Harbert is exceedingly beloved at Court of all men,” and on 29 November that, “Lord Harbert is highly favoured by the Queen”). 36
Despite being an attractive prospect Pembroke for a variety of reasons would not commit to marriage, which fits well with the poet’s urging the youth to marry in the first section of 19 sonnets. He declined in 1595, at an early age, to accept Elizabeth Carey, daughter of Sir George Carey on grounds of “not liking.” In 1597 lengthy negotiations failed to conclude a nuptial contract with Bridget Vere, daughter of the Earl of Oxford and in 1599 a further proposal to match him with the niece of the Earl of Nottingham, was unsuccessful. 37 Rowland Whyte reports to his uncle Robert Sidney, “I do not find any disposition at all in this gallant young Lord to marry.” 38 Pembroke clearly was preoccupied with other things, including tennis and tilting. (Whyte reports on 26 September 1600 that “My Lord Harbert resolves this yeare to shew hymself a man at armes, and prepares for yt,” and on 30 October 1600, that “My Lord Harbert is practising at Greenwich . . He leapes, he daunces, he singes . . he makes his horse runne with more speede.”) He was also preoccupied with affairs of court and other affairs of the heart. (Clarendon later allowed that “he was immoderately given up to women.”) 39 Late in 1600 Mary Fitton, daughter of Sir Edward Fitton, one of Sir Henry Sidney’s presidents in Ireland, was “proued with chyld, and the Earl of Pembroke beinge examyned confesseth a fact but utterly renounced all marriage.” 40 The child died at birth: Tobie Matthew recounts to Dudley Carelton on 25 March 1601, “The Earle of Pembrooke is committed to the fleet; his cause is deliuered of a boy, who is dead.” 41 After a brief spell in prison on 12 August 1601 he was banished from court by Elizabeth to Wilton, one of the family residences. In September 1603 negotiations were under way to conclude a marriage with Mary Talbot, daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury: on 17 September Thomas Crewe writes to the the Countess of Shrewsbury that he had been asked by Sir Thomas Edmonds, “whether I had bene acquaynted with a motion of a match betwene my Lord of Pembroke and my Ladye Marye,” while on 23 December he informs the Earl of Shrewsbury that he has “found a reall and determyned resolution in my Lord of Pembroke to pcede to the concludinge of matters between yor Lo. and him uppon the conditions pposed by yor L.” 42 He married Mary Talbot on 4 November 1604. The marriage was childless.
It is highly unlikely that William Herbert and Shakespeare would not have been acquainted with one another, certainly around the turn of the century. Subsequent to his coronation, for example, James I, because of the plague in London, spent most of the remainder of the year holding court at Wilton, occasionally visiting the Sidney home where both the Countess and her family were in residence: on 29-30 August 1603 the “Royal Party were entertained at Wilton” and again in October. On 2 December 1603 Shakespeare’s company, the “Kings men,” newly named on 17 May 1603, were present at Wilton (presumably absent from London where the theatres were closed) and acted before the King for which they were paid £30, although it is not known what was performed. 43 It is reasonable, then, to assume that the two would have been known to each other.
Further evidence in support of William Herbert can be found among the procreation sonnets at Sonnet 3, which calls on the youth to look upon himself in a mirror, and, seeing his reflected beauty, be moved to beget another face, in which he will in future times see himself afresh.
Looke in thy glasse and tell the face thou vewest, Now is the time that face should forme an other, Whose fresh repaire if now thou not renewest . .
The poet proceeds, in one of the most carefully crafted sonnets of the sequence, to cite as an exemplar the youth’s mother, who now sees again in her son “the louely Aprill of her prime.” So ought the youth be able to see again, despite his later wrinkles, his prime reflected in his child. Citing the youth’s mother and not, as might be expected, his father suggests a deliberate departure from convention (it is the only reference to an actual mother in the sequence), since a continuance based on the father would have more firmly established the parallelism of the youth seeing his image in a child begotten by him (there is a cryptic allusion, couched in the past tense, to the youth’s father in Sonnet 13, “You had a Father, let your Son say so”):
Thou art thy mothers glasse and she in thee Calls back the louely Aprill of her prime, So thou through windowes of thine age shalt see, Dispight of wrinkles this thy goulden time.
The phrase ‘the April of one’s prime’ or ‘April of one’s age’ was of very recent literary lineage and was closely associated with the Countess of Pembroke through a passage in Sir Philip Sidney’s The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, composed during the early 1580s, first published in 1590 and subsequently in 1593 by the Countess. The trope is found in an Arcadian episode, when Pamela is being urged to marry Amphialus by his mother Cecropia, who argues that, while beauty must either flourish or be devoured by time, her son’s love would forgo looking on Pamela if it were to “breed” any offence:
for Beauty goes awaye, deuoured by Time, but where remaines it euer flourishing, but in the hart of a true louer? And such a one (if euer there were any) is my son: whose loue is so subiected vnto you, that rather then breed any offence vnto you, it will not delight it selfe in beholding you. There is no effect of his loue (answered Pamela) better pleaseth me then that: but as I haue often answered you, so, resolutely I say vnto you, that he must get my parents consent, and then he shall know further of my minde.
Cecropia then addresses Pamela as, “O sweet youth,” and instructs her to contrast the face she will later look upon in a mirror with her present face: her glass must teach her the lesson that she is now “in the april of your age:”
so do you pleasantly enioy that, which else will bring an ouer-late repentance, when your glas shall accuse you to your face, what a change there is in you. Do you see how the spring-time is full of flowers, decking it selfe with them, and not aspiring to the fruits of Autumn? what lesson is that vnto you, but that in the april of your age, you should be like April?
Cecropia finally urges Pamela to seize this occasion to marry and not have recourse to the fruitless argument that she needs her parents’ permission. Does Pamela want her beauty not to endure and be cut short by wrinkles,
Your selfe know, how your father hath refused all offers made by the greatest Princes about you, & wil you suffer your beauty to be hidden in the wrinckles of his peuish thoughts? 44
The trope was immediately used by Samuel Daniel in his sequence, Delia. Daniel was a regular at Wilton from 1590-91 onwards and acknowledges the Countess’ assistance, when addressing his A Defence of Rhyme to William Herbert in 1603:
Hauing bene first incourag’d & fram’d thereunto by your most worthy & honorable mother, and receiued the first notion for the formall ordering of those compositions at Wilton, which I must euer acknowledge to haue beene my best Schoole. 45
The Delia of his sequence, it has been argued by Margaret Hannay, was the Countess of Pembroke herself. 46 A selection of Daniel’s sonnets had been appended without warrant and with mistakes to the pirated edition of Astrophil and Stella in 1591. In the 1592 authorized edition of Delia, dedicated to the Countess, Daniel uses the trope to complain of Delia (or the Countess), “the starre in my mishap imposd this paine, / To spend the Aprill of my yeeres in wayling.” 47 Daniel also for the first time attaches to the volume’s frontispiece the motto, “Aetas prima canat veneres postrema tumultus” (‘The prime of life sings of loves, later life of strifes’). The adage is from Sextus Propertius. 48 The phrase would become a favourite of poets and sonneteers: Michael Drayton in Peirs Gaueston Earle of Cornwall of 1594 has, “This Edward in the April of his age;” George Peele in The Old Wiues Tale (1595) calculates that the April of one’s age extends only to 20 years (“I seeme, about some twenty yeares, the very Aprill of mine age”); Bartholomew Griffin in Fidessa (1596) remarks, “I Haue not spent the Aprill of my time, / The sweet of youth in plotting in the aire,” while Robert Tofte in Laura (1597) writes, “Rich Damaske Roses in faire cheekes doo bide / Of my sweet Girle, like Aprill in his prime.” 49
The trope, then, was closely associated with the Herbert/Sidney circle and was used particularly and formally of William Herbert in 1607 by Richard Carew, an antiquary, poet, local historian and an intimate of the family. As a young scholar at Christ Church, Oxford, he had been summoned in 1570 to a disputatio ex tempore with Sir Philip Sidney, which he described as an “unequal encounter with Achilles” (“impar congressus Achilli”). He translated the first five cantos of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata 50 and was the author of The Excellencie of the English Tongue, written in 1605 but not published until 1614, at whose conclusion he argued for the preeminence of English verse by drawing parallels between a number of poets, ancient and modern, among whom he paired Shakespeare and Catullus:
Will you reade Virgill? take the Earle of Surrey: Catullus? Shakespheare and Barlowes [sic] fragment: Ouid? Daniell, Lucan? Spencer, Martial? Sir Iohn Dauies and others. Will you haue all in all for Prose and verse? take the miracle of our age Sir Philip Sidney. 51
He also translated Henri Estienne’s L’introduction au traité de la conformité des merveilles Anciennes avec les modernes of 1566 under the title, A World of Wonders: Or an Introduction to a Treatise touching the Conformitie of ancient and moderne wonders published in 1607. 52 Just as John Heming and Henry Condell dedicated the 1623 folio edition of Shakespeare’s works to “The Most Noble and Incomparable Paire of Brethren. William Earle of Pembroke, &c. Lord Chamberlaine to the Kings most Excellent Maiesty. And Philip Earle of Montgomery, &c. Gentleman of his Maiesties Bed-Chamber,” so Carew dedicated his A World of Wonders to the same pair, “To the Right Honorable Lords, William Earle of Pembroke: Philip Earle of Montgomerie: Patrons of learning: patterns of Honor.” (Carew’s is a standard play on the patron/pattern pun; see also Thorpe’s description of John Florio as “both patterne and patron.”) 53 In his dedication he presents his translation as “his poore Orphane newly come into a strange country,” and acknowledges that Estienne had hosted the Earls’ uncle, Philip Sidney, in Heidelberg, Salzburg and Vienna and had dedicated his Greek New Testament of 1576 to him. He acclaims their mother as “your honourable Mother (the vertuous Ladie, and thrise renowned Countesse of Pembroke” and in words echoing the Arcadian passage above dedicates his work to her offspring, “whom the blossoms of many rare vertues putting forth so timely in this Aprill of your age, do promise more then ordinary fruite of great good in time to come.” 54 Shakespeare’s comparison of mother and son in Sonnet 3, in which the youth pointedly is instructed to imitate his mother and to see reflected in his child “the louely Aprill of [his] prime,” shares a literary trope originating in The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia. The trope was deliberately applied to William Herbert in a conventional and formal dedication by Richard Carew in 1607. The literary and historical conjunctions strongly urge an identification of the youth of the sequence as William Herbert.
An objection to the candidacy of William Herbert (and indeed Henry Wriothesley) is the claim that Thorpe, who in his other dedications is given to craven propriety, would never have addressed an Earl as ‘MR.’ 55 But addressing “MR. W. H.,” as “MR.’ obtains an anonymity that would pique buyers’ interest and enable Thorpe, if necessary later, to disavow any identification. That it was a deliberately discreet or surreptitious mode of address is clear from the barbed censure of anonymous dedications by Ben Jonson. In the dedication to his Epigrammes in 1616 he resolves to address them explicitly to the Earl of Pembroke, now Lord Chamberlain. He addresses Pembroke correctly as “MY LORD” and avows that he “dare not change your title” and so under the name of “Lord” resolves to “offer to your Lo: the ripest of my studies, my Epigrammes.” He will not imitate whomever it was that needed to mask the identity of his dedicatee by using a cypher, having nothing on his conscience that he need hide: “For, when I made them, I had nothing in my conscience, to expressing of which I did need a cypher.” 56 A “cypher” was an abbreviation, 57 but was also the specific term used, when the initials of a name, rather than the name itself, were engraved on title-leaves or in dedications, often in polemical writings to hide the identity of the author. Robert Parsons, for example, takes exception in his An Answer to a Certayne Vayne, and Arrogant Epistle of O. E. to the author who “resolued to mask, and cypher his name vnder the letters of O.E.” and attacks him for “masking himselfe with the vizard of two vowels O.E. (which may stand perhaps in his cypher for Owles Eyes to looke thorough and to see, and not be seene agayne).” 58 In the years before 1616 there is no instance of a dedication to any one in any volume under the cypher, “W. H.,” which would have been the cypher for William Herbert, other than the occurrence of the initials in Thomas Thorpe’s dedication to Shake-speares Sonnets. If Jonson’s jibe is to be taken at face value, it must refer to an occasion when William Herbert’s name was not fully used in a dedication, but a cypher employed instead, and the sole occasion when the cypher “W. H.” was used was in Thorpe’s dedication. Jonson claims that “conscience” played a part in masking the identity. Just why conscience should have caused Herbert’s name to be cyphered remains unknown.