Note 406 — APPENDIX

James Boaden, a journalist and the biographer of Kemble and Mrs. Siddons, was the first to suggest the Pembroke theory in a letter to the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1832. A few months later Mr. James Heywood Bright wrote to the magazine claiming to have reached the same conclusion as early as 1819, although he had not published it. Boaden re-stated the Pembroke theory in a volume on Shakespeare’s Sonnets which he published in 1837. C. Armitage Brown adopted it in 1838 in his Shakespeare’s Autobiographical Poems. The Rev. Joseph Hunter, who accepted the theory without qualification, significantly pointed out in his New Illustrations of Shakespeare in 1845 (ii. 346) that it had not occurred to any of the writers in the great Variorum editions of Shakespeare, nor to critics so acute in matters of literary history as Malone or George Chalmers. The theory is treated as proved fact in many recent literary manuals. Of its supporters at the date of writing the most ardent is Mr. Thomas Tyler, who published an edition of the sonnets in 1890, and there further advanced a claim to identify the ‘dark lady’ of the sonnets with Mary Fitton, a lady of the Court and the Earl of Pembroke’s mistress. Mr. Tyler has endeavoured to substantiate both the Pembroke and the Fitton theories, by merely repeating his original arguments, in a pamphlet which appeared in April of this year under the title of The Herbert-Fitton Theory: a Reply [i.e. to criticisms of the theories by Lady Newdegate and by myself]. The Pembroke theory, whose adherents have dwindled of late, will henceforth be relegated, I trust, to the category of popular delusions.