Robert Bridges and Samuel Butler on Shakespeare’s Sonnets: An Exchange of Letters

Abstract

N exchange of letters (hitherto published only in fragments') between Robert Bridges and Samuel Butler on Shakespeare's Sonnets is of interest not only because it reflects the attitude toward the Sonnets of two important literary men of the last century, but also because it has a direct relevance to more recent attempts by Leslie Hotson to date the poems and by John Crowe Ransom and Yvor Winters to re-evaluate their merits. The occasion of the correspondence was the publication of Samuel Butler's Shakespeare's Sonnets Reconsidered (i899).2 Butler sent Bridges a complimentary copy of his book. In thanking him, the future poet laureate gave Butler a frank appraisal of what he considered to be the merits and demerits of the volume. A lively discussion ensued which is published in full below. There are several explicit references to Butler's theories in the New Variorum edition of the Sonnets; nevertheless, Butler's book is not so well known as it perhaps deserves to be. For example, Leslie Hotson, who came to almost the same conclusions as Butler regarding the dating and subject matter of Sonnet I07 and to the dating of the entire sequence,' claimed that in I947, almost fifty years after Butler's publication and three years after the New Variorum edition which cited Butler on sonnet i07, he was not aware of Butler's work.4 In his Preface, Butler says that his volume was inspired by his reading of two articles in the Fortnightly Review5 by William Archer and Sidney Lee. Archer identified the W. H. of Thorpe's dedication as William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. Lee (at that time) believed W. H. to be Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. Butler felt that neither Archer nor Lee had made a case and