as
autobiographic revelations of sentiment, many of them offer evidence of
the relations in which he stood to a patron, and to the position that he
sought to fill in the circle of that patron's literary retainers. Twenty
sonnets, which may for purposes of exposition be entitled 'dedicatory'
sonnets, are addressed to one who is declared without periphrasis and
without disguise to be a patron of the poet's verse (Nos. xxiii., xxvi.,
xxxii., xxxvii., xxxviii., lxix., lxxvii.-lxxxvi., c., ci., cvi.) In one
of these--Sonnet lxxviii.--Shakespeare asserted:

So oft have I invoked thee for my Muse
And found such fair assistance in my verse
As every alien pen hath got my use
And under thee their poesy disperse.

Subsequently he regretfully pointed out how his patron's readiness to
accept the homage of other poets seemed to be thrusting him from the
enviable place of pre-eminence in his patron's esteem.

The Earl of Southampton the poet's sole patron.

Shakespeare's biographer is under an obligation to attempt an
identification of the persons whose relations with the poet are defined
so explicitly. The problem presented by the patron is simple.
Shakespeare states unequivocally that he has no patron but one.

Sing [_sc._ O Muse!] to the ear that doth thy lays esteem,
And gives thy pen both skill and argument (c. 7-8).
For to no other pass my verses tend
Than of your graces and your gifts to tell (ciii. 11-12).

The Earl of Southampton, the patron of his narrative poems, is the only
patron of Shakespeare that is known to biographical research. No
contemporary document or tradition gives the faintest suggestion that
Shakespeare was the friend or dependent of any other man of rank. A
trustworthy tradition corroborates the testimony respecting Shakespeare's
close intimacy with the Earl that is given in the dedicatory epistles of
his 'Venus and Adonis' and 'Lucrece', penned respectively in 1593 and
1594. According to Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeare's first adequate
biographer, 'there is one instance so singular in its magnificence of
this patron of Shakespeare's that if I had not been assured that the
story was handed down by Sir William D'Avenant, who was probably very
well acquainted with his affairs, I should not venture to have inserted;
that my Lord Southampton at one time gave him a thousand pounds to enable
him to go through with a purchase which he heard he had a mind to. A
bounty