The Fair Youth

LISTEN TO THE SONNETCAST SPECIAL ON
​THE FAIR YOUTH

Any discussion of the Fair Youth of William Shakespeare’s Sonnets has to begin with a first fundamental question, from which flows everything that follows:

Is there a Fair Youth at all?

To phrase this more precisely: is there, as has been the understanding and in a sense the traditional reading of the Sonnets for nearly 250 years, principally one young man to whom the majority of the first 126 sonnets in the 1609 collection are either addressed directly, or with whom they concern themselves by talking about William Shakespeare’s relationship with him, or are there, as has become the view of some scholars, particularly in the second half of the 20th century, no reasons to make any such assumptions, and are the Fair Youth Sonnets much rather an assembly of poems themed around beauty, youth, and an attendant infatuation with possibly several young men, or even, among them, some women.

The question goes hand in hand with an even more fundamental one: are these sonnets rooted in William Shakespeare’s real life experience, or are they effectively studies, playfulnesses, poetic exercises that have little or nothing to do with real people and concern themselves neither with a ‘fair youth’ nor with a ‘dark lady’ such as could be said to ever have existed in the sonnets that then follow, before the final two, which everybody agrees, have nothing much to do with either of these two figures.

Once these two paired or similarly orientated questions have been answered we can and, I would strongly argue, should then delve deeper and ask ourselves:

Is the Fair Youth, if such a person exists, the same throughout, including the first seventeen sonnets which are generally accepted to form a sequence in their own right, or is the Procreation Sequence really distinct from the body of the Fair Youth sonnets and concerns itself with somebody entirely different.

And then of course, and to many, but by no means all, enquiring minds most riveting, most intriguing, and therefore most fascinating: if there is a Fair Youth, then who is it?

And here it is only right and proper to place a major spoiler alert: the answer to all of these questions is: we don’t know. At least not for certain. Anyone who tells you otherwise is overplaying their hand, we have absolutely no proof that anything is certainly the case.

But we have the wealth of these sonnets which we have been taking a genuinely close look at for the last 126 weeks, not counting the special episodes, and we also do have some circumstantial evidence, and so we can form a picture that is based on reasonable interpretation, diligent analysis, and a coherent reading of the sonnets: we can formulate a view that is based not merely on assumption or on personal preference, but on greater or lesser degrees of plausibility, a continuum, so to speak, of what we can and cannot know.

Starting then at the very beginning, because it is, as Maria von Trapp tells us in the musical imagining of her story, 'a very good place to start’:

Is there a Fair Youth?

My answer, as you will know if you’ve been listening to this podcast, is: yes.

Almost as certain as we can be about anything, I postulate that we can be quite certain that a young man who captured Shakespeare’s heart and prompted him to write the majority of these sonnets existed.

It’s a view that is and has been held by many, though certainly not all, people, and to me it is the only one that makes sense.

Whence though, you are entitled to ask – especially if you are new to the subject and haven’t been listening to me and my guests for fifty-odd hours – do I get this level of confidence about something that is after all hotly disputed by, among others, highly respected Shakespeare scholars?

The tradition of viewing William Shakespeare’s Sonnets as broadly relating to two respective relationships Shakespeare was having with a beautiful young nobleman and a black-haired, black-eyed, tan-skinned woman dates back to 1780 and the edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets published by the Irish barrister and Shakespeare scholar Edmond Malone.

Now, Edmond Malone’s edition is not a trifle.

Let me briefly recap, so we get our ducks in a row, and for those of you who are new to this: the Sonnets were first published during William Shakespeare’s lifetime, in the famous Quarto Edition of 1609.

Some people argue that this Quarto Edition was unauthorised and put together either by the publisher, Thomas Thorpe, or by someone else, but that Shakespeare had no hand in it and did not want it published then.

Others argue that it was indeed William Shakespeare who put the collection together and gave it its clearly intentional structure, but that he still didn’t want this collection published at the time.

Others still argue that Shakespeare was fully involved in the publication and that therefore the 1609 collection presents us the Sonnets as and when Shakespeare would have wanted them to be read.

Whichever is the case, what is certain is that the collection of 1609 has a clear structure: it starts with 17 sonnets that tell a young man to marry and have children, these are the Procreation Sonnets 1-17.

It then continues with a large section encompassing 109 poems that concern themselves with the love of a young man, with beauty, with time, with age, with the age difference between Shakespeare and this young man, with the difference in status between them, with the sorrow of separation, and the jealousy and pain when the younger lover is having affairs with other people, with the state of the world.

Then the tone changes and we get 26 sonnets that clearly stand in the context of a completely different, highly sexualised relationship, with a woman who may in fact be married to someone else.

At the very end, there are two sonnets that evoke a classical allegory and that don’t seem to have anything to do with either of these two people.

Whoever therefore put together these sonnets did so with a clear understanding of the themes and characters involved, and as we have seen over the course of our examination, there appears to be an overlap between the two sections: a woman whom Shakespeare considers to be his mistress appears in the first part, between Sonnets 33 and 42, because the young man he is in love with has an affair with her, and as we shall see very soon when we get to them, in the section that follows there are two sonnets which explicitly refer to a young man whom this woman is involved with whom Shakespeare considers his lover.

The Quarto of 1609 can then be considered to be an authoritative edition even if we can’t say with certainty that it is fully authorial in terms of its curation. Worth also bearing in mind is that we have no evidence of Shakespeare ever challenging it, and so in the absence of anything else, we may take the Quarto of 1609 to be our benchmark and our reference.

William Shakespeare dies in 1616 and the first collection of his plays, the First Folio, appears posthumously in 1623, put together by his friends and colleagues John Heminges and Henry Condell, who were both actors with the King’s Men, the theatre company that Shakespeare belonged to as an actor and shareholder and that he wrote many of his plays for.

The First Folio therefore contains only Shakespeare’s plays, not the Sonnets and not his narrative poems.

The first major reprinting of the Sonnets happens in 1640 under the ‘editorship’ – if this is a term that can be applied here – of John Benson. Benson is the man who liberally regroups the sonnets, adds his own titles to them, changes male pronouns to female ones to make the sonnets sound like they were written to or about a woman, and leaves out those he doesn’t like.

The Benson edition of 1640 therefore is widely considered today to have done much more harm than good as it completely distorted the work for the unsuspecting reader, and it did so for another 140 years, because it is not until Edmond Malone comes along in 1780 that the Sonnets are restored to the order in which they were first published and given their first scholarly treatment.

And so the first person to recognise the Sonnets for their literary value and to take them seriously is Edmond Malone, and he is also the person who identifies the obvious structure of the collection, because he is the first person to honour it since the Quarto.

The tradition of the Fair Youth and the Dark Lady then is not a misguided whim by some random person, as you might get the impression when talking to some of the people who reject it: it is a conclusion arrived at by a serious scholar who effectively rescued the sonnets from the enormous damage that had been done to them for one and a half centuries by John Benson.

And it became a tradition because subsequently, and for around the next two hundred years, scholars and editors – we can assume with their own critical faculties mostly intact – agreed with Malone’s understanding of the Sonnets, and so over this period the view took hold that they are certainly autobiographical.

This is not difficult to appreciate: as we have seen time and again when discussing these sonnets, they positively invite such a reading. And there are several arguments that speak strongly in favour of accepting them as autobiographical.

First, their sheer number: Shakespeare’s is the longest series of sonnets we have from the era and while this on its own proves nothing, it points to a great and sustained urge or need by the poet to express himself in relation to these relationships. Either that, or he has some other compelling reason to so: he is, as we have seen, a busy man. Such compelling reasons might be a patron or client requesting or commissioning them, or a need to, as today we might say, monetise them.

Neither, however, is the case. Apart from the Procreation Sonnets which may very well have been commissioned, none in the collection sound like they do their work for someone else; and as we know, although they were at least in parts composed at the height of fashion for the form, by the time they were first published about ten years later, they were not a commercial success.

Second their emotional involvement and range. While some of these sonnets do sound very much like fairly standard traditional sonnets, many, if not the majority, are radically different from the norm. They cover a vast array of emotions and constellational positions that go way beyond what one might expect from a poet who is simply practising his craft.

More to the point still, and third, the flawed nature of their subjects. As Professor Stephen Regan pointed out in our conversation about The Sonnet as a Poetic Form, these sonnets are highly unusual and in fact groundbreaking in that they do not deal with one idealised love, and not even with two idealised loves, but with two seriously flawed and for that all the more relatable human beings.

Fourth, the fact alone that Shakespeare is writing the majority of these sonnets to, for, and about a young man. While there were other male poets who wrote about their affection for other men, none did so over such a long period, and in such depth and tremendous nuance and detail.

Fifth, the trajectory they chart. As we have seen week upon week, while these sonnets do not describe a clear and linear path, they do build a development arc of a relationship through many ups and downs and through phases that weave into and out of each other, exactly as you would expect from a lived experience.

Which ties into sixth, their coherence: I have been saying it often and I do not mind repeating it because it baffles me how anyone, let alone any scholar, could wish to actively ignore it: context. Time and again we have seen how sonnets that may in isolation look and sound fairly random, the moment they are considered in their actual context, make perfect sense as part of that trajectory.

And seventh, and by no means least important: their compatibility with what we know about Shakespeare and with the historical, biographical details we have on him.

And so it is not surprising or amiss that Edmond Malone recognises a division between what have ever since been known as the Fair Youth section and the Dark Lady section of the Sonnets. And neither is it surprising or amiss that in the century that follows, a biographical or rather, as we should properly call it, autobiographical reading of the sonnets continues to hold sway.

This lasts – with some notable voices of skepticism, so as not to say dissent, for example from T S Elliot in the early 1920s – right into the second half of the 20th century, when literature studies, and therefore Shakespeare studies, start to be heavily influenced by French deconstructionist thinkers around Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and others who propagate the idea of The Death of the Author, as Roland Barthes entitles his most famous book.

And from here on in scholars start to actively dislike the idea that an 'author' as such even exists, let alone can be read as speaking from their own lived individual experience in their own individual voice about something that truly matters and is specific to them. Literature, to put their position into a somewhat simplified nutshell, comes from the cultural milieu in which the person who happens to be writing operates and it expresses mostly a given Zeitgeist, whereby fundamentally the reader understands what they in their culture are conditioned to read, which may have little or nothing to do with the wordsmith's intentions.

I discuss this a bit also in our episode on Sonnet 104, and there I also refer to our conversation with Professor Gabriel Egan who – as he freely admits to his own surprise and considerable bewilderment – finds that having been brought up on the ‘death of the author' theory, he finds that with contemporary computational approaches and methods, we can prove that the author is very much alive and kicking and putting their personal, individual stamp on quite literally everything they do with their literature.

And so can we prove the Fair Youth exists as a historical figure who causes Shakespeare to write these sonnets? We cannot. Can we assume, more than assume, can we deduce as much from what we know and have in front of us? I argue yes, with great confidence, we can.

You may recall that while discussing Sonnet 122 I introduced a ‘likelihood' or 'plausibility scale’ from nought to twelve, where nought is so unlikely as to be almost certainly not the case and twelve is so likely as to almost certainly be the case. On that scale, I would say that, considering all the indicators we have, it is level eleven to twelve likely that there is a Fair Youth who is a real person in Shakespeare’s life.

The question whether or not these sonnets are rooted in Shakespeare’s own actual experience thus answers itself, which allows us to move on to the next question that then immediately follows:

Is this Fair Youth of the bulk of the Sonnets the same as the young man of the first 17 Procreation Sonnets, or could it be someone else entirely?

This is both more difficult to answer and easier too.

It is more difficult, because we only have the 17 sonnets that preoccupy themselves with procreation, and they are categorically more impersonal, more generic than the others: we noted at one point that they could have been written by almost any good poet to almost any handsome young man who is obstinate in his refusal to to marry. And so generally speaking such characteristics as we glean from the first 17 sonnets could as comparatively easily apply to one such young man as any other.

It is at the same time easier to answer though, because such characteristics as we do glean from the first 17 sonnets are in some places so specific and precise, and overlap so neatly and convincingly with those that feature in the main body of the Fair Youth Sonnets, that it would be an extraordinary coincidence if these two sections of the Sonnets were written to two different young men.

The Procreation Sonnets yield the picture of a young man who is not just exceptionally good looking, but admired by the world around him for his beauty, and who is of high social status: in all but certainty a young aristocrat. This continues into the main section.

Sonnet 3 tells its recipient “thou art thy mother’s glass” which, we noted at the time, is a highly unusual thing to say to a young man. Far more obvious for most young men would be to be compared to their father, certainly in terms of whom they look like. Sonnet 20, the third sonnet after we leave the procreation sequence tells its recipient:

A woman’s face, with Nature’s own hand painted
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion.

This is not only highly unusual, it also matches up exactly with Sonnet 3, but now goes into quite suggestive territory, still referring to a personified Nature:

       But since she pricked thee out for women’s pleasure
       Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure.

This sauciness of language does not come out of nowhere though. Shakespeare builds up to it in Sonnets 15 & 16 which as a pair are the first ones to suggest that Shakespeare’s writing could do what until then the poems stressed only he, the young man, could do himself by producing an heir: make him live beyond his own physical existence on earth.

Sonnet 17 then reinforces that point and Sonnet 18, the first sonnet in the collection to break free from the idea of procreation, boldly declares:

       So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
       So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

In other words, there is a progression through the Procreation Sonnets into the main body of the Fair Youth Sonnets.

And so on our likelihood scale from nought to twelve, I would say it is level ten to eleven likely that we are talking about the same young man, but we can’t rule out the possibility that Shakespeare just happened to have reason to write these sonnets, which in the collection are grouped together at the beginning, for someone else, who nonetheless sounds in many respects just like his young lover.

And this then – you might think ‘at long last’ – brings us to the most tantalising question of them all:

Who is it the Fair Youth?

You may have listened to our conversation on this podcast with Paul Edmondson and Sir Stanley Wells, who reorganised the Sonnets for their edition that contains sonnets also from the plays, and heard Paul Edmondson say that questions as to who the young man is are only “slightly interesting, because they cannot, in the end be answered.”

On this I respectfully beg to differ. If we have any reason at all to believe that there was a Fair Youth who was so important to our poet that he, Shakespeare, wrote poem after poem after poem to and for him, and about his relationship with him, then the question as to who this is becomes extraordinarily interesting and, more to the point, it also becomes potentially important to our understanding of Shakespeare. 

The moment this question is acknowledged to be of interest, even importance, two individuals above all move centre stage. There are others that have been put forward, and they all can be dismissed almost immediately. But since this is a special episode on The Fair Youth, let’s roll them up briefly so we get a comprehensive enough picture.

Among those who have at one point or another been suggested as the Fair Youth are:

Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex. He was certainly a dashing nobleman of great importance, but as we noted very recently, during our discussion of Sonnet 125, he was born in 1565, one year after Shakespeare, and that makes him essentially the same age. Also, there is no serious evidence to support his connection to Shakespeare.

Sir Philip Sidney. He was a celebrated poet at the time and certainly cuts a handsome figure, but he was nine years older than Shakespeare, married by 1583 when Shakespeare was still in Stratford, and dead by 1586, long before the first sonnets are believed to have been written.

Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange. He was the patron of the Lord Strange’s Men, the theatre company Shakespeare belonged to before it came under the patronage of the Lord Chamberlain and became known as the Lord Chamberlain's Men. He too, though, is in fact older than Shakespeare, and he too died too early, in 1594, to be a contender.

Barnabe Barnes. He was an English poet who himself wrote sonnets, and, having been born in 1571 and died in 1606 he could possibly match the dates, but he’s nowhere near noble, important, or revered enough to qualify for the Fair Youth, though we did name him as an outside candidate for the Rival Poet.

King James VI & I. This is one of the more outlandish propositions and it stems from the known fact that King James had male favourites and an interest in poetry. But not only did he not come down from Scotland to London until 1603 – and there is no evidence of any connection between Shakespeare and him before then – but he was also only two years younger than Shakespeare and married to Anne of Denmark by 1589.

There is also, of course, at least in theory, the possibility that the Fair Youth may be someone we don’t know of: a dapper young man who takes Shakespeare’s fancy but who remains unknown to us. But this is extremely unlikely because the sonnets repeatedly make a point of positioning the young man in the public sphere: he is known by the world around him, he is admired, other poets write poetry for him.

London in the 1590s is a dynamic, rapidly growing city, with the population ballooning during the decade from around 120,000 to 200,000 people, depending a bit on whether places outside the city walls, such as Southwark where The Globe Theatre is located, are counted or not.

But of those inhabitants, the high echelons – gentry, courtiers, and perhaps some wealthy merchants and social risers – make up about 5% to 10%, so between 6,000 and 20,000 people.

Of these half are women and of the remaining 3,000 to 10,000 individuals, between 35%-45% would be under the age of 16, typically the earliest point at which a young male heir would be expected to start thinking about marriage.

Which leaves us with anything between around 1,600 and maybe 6,000 individuals. But we are not looking at all adult males, we are looking at males between approximately the ages of 16 and 21, which typically would be around 15%-20% of the population, so we now have around 300 to probably a maximum of 1,000 individuals who are actually eligible as the Fair Youth. That's still many, you could say: but this is a small town’s worth of people. And these people are connected. They know each other and we know who the ones are that matter. So while it is possible that the Fair Youth is an unknown entity, it is, in fact, really rather unlikely; on our plausibility scale from nought to twelve, I would say it sits around 3 or 4.

And that leaves us with our two main contenders who are by some margin therefore also the ones you hear mentioned most often:

Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton and William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke.

They have much in common and they both tick several important boxes.

1 They are both men.

2 They are both men of status and stature and extremely well connected to the seat of power, the Queen herself.

3 They both have proven connections to William Shakespeare: Henry Wriothesley has two major works dedicated to him, the long narrative poems Venus and Adonis in 1593, and the following year, in 1594, The Rape of Lucrece. William Herbert is the son of Henry Herbert, 2nd Earl of Pembroke who is patron of Pembroke's Men, a theatre company Shakespeare is also believed to have worked for before becoming part of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, and William and his brother Philip Herbert are in fact the dedicatees of the  First Folio.

4 Henry Wriothesley and William Herbert are both known to have been, and to have been widely considered to be, handsome, even beautiful.

5 They were both obstinate in their refusal to marry and went to great lengths and enormous expense to avoid marrying the women they were supposed to wed.

6 They were both signally younger than Shakespeare: Wriothesley was born in October 1573, which makes him almost ten years younger, which, as we have noted once or twice, with the average life expectancy of a man in London standing at around 30 is considerably more pronounced an age difference than we would think it today; Herbert was born in April 1580, almost exactly 16 years after Shakespeare.

7 For both of them we have documented events and incidents that point to a character and lifestyle that is compatible with the portrayal of the Fair Youth in the Sonnets.

What mainly sets them apart from each other are the dates when they become old enough to marry, and some highly specific details that point more towards one or the other.

The first of these to get out of the way is the supposition that William Herbert might be the dedicatee of the Quarto Edition.

The Quarto Edition of 1609 bears a dedication – not by Shakespeare himself but by the publisher Thomas Thorpe – to a “Mr W. H.” and it is so fraught with difficulties and uncertainties, and has so much potential for speculation and conjecture, that it absolutely merits its own episode, which of course I will record for you, towards the end of this podcast series.

Suffice it to say for the time being that the evidence for Thorpe to refer to the son of an Earl and heir of the title as “Mr” and to call the man who is only subject of the majority, but by no means all of the Sonnets “the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets” is extremely flimsy. So flimsy that I am prepared to effectively discount it. And I will explain why in much greater detail when we come to it.

Overall, what favours William Herbert is the clear difference in age between him and Shakespeare: in 1595 Herbert, aged 15, is lined up to marry Elizabeth Carey, the granddaughter of Henry Carey, 1st Baron Hundson who is then the Lord Chamberlain and the patron of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men: the acting company William Shakespeare belongs to. Herbert refuses.

Shakespeare is by now 31, twice his age, and could well be smitten with the handsome youth. Two years later, in 1597, Herbert, now aged 17, is urged by his father to marry Bridget de Vere, daughter of William Cecil, 1st Baron Burleigh, otherwise known simply as Lord Burleigh. He is Lord High Treasurer to the Queen and one of her chief advisors, and thus one of the most powerful men in the country.

Herbert again refuses and this is even more plausible to have prompted someone to commission Shakespeare to write some sonnets for the young man to urge him to marry.

The problem with these dates is that they push the earliest composition of the sonnets past 1594, and that makes some of them difficult to reconcile with what they say about Shakespeare’s position in life: from 1595 onwards Shakespeare – with his theatre company under the patronage of the Lord Chamberlain – becomes increasingly established and well known, which stands at odds with poems like Sonnet 25:

Let those who are in favour with their stars
Of public honour and proud titles boast,
Whilst I, whom fortune of such triumph bars,
Unlooked for joy in that I honour most.

Or Sonnet 29: “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes.”

Similarly, the magnificent rant of Sonnet 66,“Tired with all these for restful death I cry,” while of course possible as a frustrated outburst, sits somewhat uneasily with the man who is becoming the most successful playwright of his age in his own lifetime and way beyond.

What strongly speaks against  William Herbert though is Sonnet 13, which ends on the line: “…you know | You had a father, let your son say so.”

This would be an extremely odd, even offensive thing to say to someone whose father was very much alive and still on the height of his powers at the time the Procreation Sonnets would have had to be written. William Herbert’s father Henry does not die until 1601: this on its own should almost rule out Herbert, but we must of course allow for the possibility that ‘had’ is a mistake here, or that Shakespeare – who as we know is not our number one logician – was just not thinking this through properly.

The inverse is true for Henry Wriothesley, which is one of several strong points in his favour: Henry Wriothesley lost his father at the age of eight and was then made the ward of the exact same Lord Burleigh, in 1581.

By the time Lord Burleigh lines him up to marry his own granddaughter Elizabeth Vere in 1590, Henry Wriothesley is 16, as we saw a quite normal age for a young man in Elizabethan England to start thinking about marriage.

Young Henry though does no such thing. He obstinately refuses, and this carries on for a further four years, until November 1595, shortly after Henry turns 21 and therefore comes of age and into his heritage with control over his vast fortune.

He now pays the Lady Vere the astonishing sum of £5000 so as not to marry her. To give you an idea, in today’s money that’s about two to three million pounds, depending a bit on how you calculate the of currency, though in terms of actual purchasing power and as an earnings-based comparison, a more meaningful figure may be between £10-15 million or roughly 12-18 million euros or dollars.

We can say with great certainty then: our young Henry right up until 1594 really does not want to marry that girl, and this makes him a very strong candidate for someone like Lord Burleigh, or his mother, or his mother’s future husband William Hervey to commission Shakespeare to write some poems for the young nobleman to help convince him of the need to marry and to produce an heir.

This imperative, to produce an heir, further speaks in favour of Wriothesley: he is the only son to his father and mother and therefore the only person who can carry on the family name and title: if he were to die childless, the estate would fall to the crown and the line would end.

It is therefore essential that he should marry and produce a male heir, which ultimately he does, though not until 1598, when he marries Elizabeth Vernon, Lady in Waiting to the Queen, much to the annoyance of the Queen, and thus lands both himself and his new wife temporarily in prison.

Elizabeth Vernon gives birth to two daughters in 1598 and 1600, before his first male heir, James Writothesley is born in 1605. He dies aged 19, only weeks before Henry, and so it is in fact Henry’s second son – the 'spare', you could say – Thomas Wriothesley, born 1607 who inherits the title and becomes 4th Earl of Southampton in 1624.

William Herbert, by contrast, has his brother Philip, who is four years his junior, who could take over the estate, as indeed he does after William himself dies. The need for William to produce an heir as the first born is thus still there, but significantly less urgent than it is for Henry Wriothesley.

What further speaks strongly in favour of Henry Wriothesley is the portrayal of the Fair Youth in both the Procreation Sonnets and the poems that follow as androgynous, even female featured. We mentioned this a moment ago: “Thou art thy mother’s glass” in Sonnet 3 and “A woman’s face, with Nature’s own hand painted” in Sonnet 20: these are highly unusual and specific things to say to a young man, even in Elizabethan England where some gentle young men do cultivate a look that makes them appear what we today might call gender-fluid. An entire branch of Shakespearean comedy is predicated on the idea that boy actors play young women who can then dress up as young men to toy with the preconceptions and feelings of other men and women in the story.

Henry Wriothesley very much does look like his mother and he very much does look like a girl as a teenager, and we don’t need to speculate about this, we have pictorial evidence of the era: use your favourite search engine to look for Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, and you will find them.

Sonnet 53, incidentally, also hints at this level of androgyny:

Describe Adonis and the counterfeit
Is poorly imitated after you,
On Helen's cheek all art of beauty set,
And you, in Grecian tires are painted new;

This is not something you can say to every young man, and really not, as far as we know, so much to William Herbert, who is handsome but quite manly in his appearance. You can absolutely say it to Henry Wriothesley.

A piece of textual evidence that swings the needle of plausibility back to William Herbert is Sonnet 104:

Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turned
In process of the seasons have I seen,
Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burned
Since first I saw you fresh which yet are green.

We discuss this in some detail in the corresponding episode: if we take this literally and the sonnet was written, as its position in the collection places it and as current scholarly opinion holds, in the early 1600s or very late 1590s, then that would mean Shakespeare met his young man around 1597-98, possibly as late as 1599.

While this does not tally with many of the other indicators that we have, it does favour William Herbert, who in 1597 is rejecting his second proposed bride. But we don’t know with any certainty whether Sonnet 104 actually does sit in the right place in the collection, nor can we say with certainty that Sonnet 104 belongs into the early Jacobean era, nor that we should take the three years as a precise timeframe.

What I argue in my analysis of the poem is that we can say with a great deal of confidence, that by the time Shakespeare writes this sonnet, his relationship with the young man must have been going on for at least three years, but possibly quite a bit longer.
 
We then have some more incidental, and in some cases perhaps more tentative, but nonetheless interesting pointers.

One of them finds itself in Sonnet 1 and then again also in Sonnets 54, 67, 95, 98, and most pronounced in Sonnet 109.

All of these sonnets reference a rose. Now this is not in itself so noteworthy: the rose as a symbol of beauty is a poetic commonplace, and Shakespeare uses the word often in his plays. But it is a rather unusual term in relation to a man. Yet Shakespeare uses it in these six sonnets relating to his young male lover: he places the rose to stand for the young man or as an example to the young man:

1
From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty's rose might never die,

54
The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem
For that sweet odour which doth in it live.

67
Why should poor beauty indirectly seek
Roses of shadow, since his rose is true?

95
How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame
Which, like a canker in the fragrant rose,
Doth spot the beauty of thy budding name?

98
Nor did I wonder at the lily’s white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose,

All of these could be read as more or less directly alluding to the young man: Sonnet 98 sounds fairly generic, while Sonnets 1 and 54 hint more specifically at him, until we come to:

106
      For nothing this wide universe I call,
      Save thou, my rose, in it thou art my all.

This is so directly aimed at the addressee and so unconventional, that you will hear people argue it must mean that Sonnet 106 has to be addressed to a woman. It is nothing of the sort.

Calling your male lover ‘my rose’ does make sense in the context of a man who is very beautiful in an androgynous way already, but there is an additional element to this which tends to get overlooked.

We have no idea how the name Wriothesley was pronounced at the time when he and Shakespeare were alive: there is no guide to it. I pronounce it 'Wrysly', because that's more or less how you spell it, but David Crystal, who is the world expert on Original Pronunciation or OP and who was our guest a little while ago hesitated to even hazard guess but then veered more towards 'Rizzly'. Equally possible though is that Henry pronounced his name 'Rothsley' or 'Rosely'.

And this would yield an attractive – though it has to be said speculative – avenue for Shakespeare, who loves his puns, to play on the Fair Youth’s name, and call him his rose for ‘rosely’.

In this manner we can go through all the first 126 sonnets that are generally considered part of the Fair Youth section and – bearing in mind that not all sonnets contain such clues – note any textual evidence that points to one or the other or both of these candidates.

A phrase such as “thou consumest thyself in single life” in Sonnet 9 could then be said to apply to both Henry Wriothesley and William Herbert equally, but it could also apply to other young men, and so on our likelihood scale from 0 to 12, one might give them both an 8-9 out of 12, suggesting that it is rather likely that it may refer to either of them, since strong points can be made.

I emphasise: this is not science. These are the humanities, we are dealing in words. This is poetry with double and triple and sometimes quadruple meanings.

But what we can do is take a systematic approach and look at the sonnets, and say, well, if we examine them closely and methodically what do we find?

There are now nearly sixty hours of deliberation in podcast format available on Sonnetcast, each hour of which involves between fourteen and eighteen hours worth of study, translation, analysis, recording and editing, and so we can objectively say that we are taking a close look. This is not a causal glance.

We may still miss things, and some clues are likely to be so tucked away, so hidden, that they will never now be decipherable for us.

You may recall, if you have been paying very close attention and possess a remarkable memory, that when discussing Sonnet 81 I somewhat reluctantly ventured that the closing couplet may contain such a hidden clue.

I am still no surer that it does now than I was then, but I promised you at the time to revisit this, and so I do want to briefly air the idea, not least just to demonstrate the level at which we may have to be listening here.

But on this particular point I cannot stress enough that this is pure speculation and possibly somewhat far-fetched.

Still, I find it hard to believe that our poet, with his flair for double and triple layered meanings, with his puns and his codes, would not find ways of hiding his lover’s name in these sonnets. And when you say the lines

       You still shall live, such virtue hath my pen,
       Where breath most breathes, even in the
                                                                  mouths of men

then the sequence of syllables “Where breath most breathes” does sound a little like the name Wriothesley as it may have been pronounced at the time: Wreethesly, or Wroysley or Wrayslay. To 'breathe' can also be pronounced to 'braythe' in Shakespeare's. So something like this is actually possible.

And that would be supremely clever and somewhat subversive sonneteering on the part of Shakespeare: to make us almost say the name of the person as we form the words in our mouths where our breath most breathes in the sonnet that talks about this precise effect, even without noticing it. and thus make him 'live even in the mouths of men' long after his death.

Shakespeare’s own name, we know was spelt and pronounced in many different ways at the time and had variant pronunciations, we certainly know of our pronunciation Shakespeare, but Shaxpere and Shaxper are also assumed to have been common. And so it is not difficult to imagine that Henry’s surname may be punned on a Rosley pronunciation in some sonnets and and here tucked away in a Wreesley or Waysley pronunciation too.

But this is the farthest I'll stray from the straight and narrow of knowable factuality: it is a speculation and I will not blame you if you consider it to be somewhat wild.

What I will leave you with is this: if it were announced tomorrow that a trunk had been found in a hidden attic in a country estate somewhere on the British isles, containing incontrovertible proof as to the identity of the Fair Youth and I had to place my last tenner on who I thought it was, then on the balance of probabilities, and going by our own Sonnetcast plausibility scale, where he scores a solid 9, nudging to 10, I would put it down on Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton.

If then the trunk were opened and it turned out to be William Herbert, who on the same scale scores around 7-8, or even someone else, I should be neither sad nor upset, that possibility does still exist.

Would I be sad and upset if it turned out there was no Fair Youth after all, that Shakespeare just made him up? Astonished, aghast, incredulous, almost a little appalled, are the words that spring to mind, because that, I really think, is by now, after these 126 Fair Youth Sonnets, so difficult as to be virtually impossible to imagine.

Or, to put it in a slightly different way: while there is no certainty that there is a Fair Youth, it is now, after such careful consideration, extremely likely. And likelihood is and remains our friend...

---

This project and its website are a work in progress.
If you spot a mistake or if you have any comments or suggestions, please use the contact page to get in touch.
​To be kept informed of developments, please subscribe to the email list. 
If you would like to donate, you can do so here. Thank you!​​