Note 127 — IX—THE PATRONAGE OF THE EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON

‘Lover’ and ‘love’ in Elizabethan English were ordinary synonyms for ‘friend’ and ‘friendship.’ Brutus opens his address to the citizens of Rome with the words, ‘Romans, countrymen, and lovers,’ and subsequently describes Julius Cæsar as ‘my best lover’ (Julius Cæsar, III. ii. 13-49). Portia, when referring to Antonio, the bosom friend of her husband Bassanio, calls him ‘the bosom lover of my lord’ (Merchant of Venice, III. iv. 17). Ben Jonson in his letters to Donne commonly described himself as his correspondent’s ‘ever true lover;’ and Drayton, writing to William Drummond of Hawthornden, informed him that an admirer of his literary work was in love with him. The word ‘love’ was habitually applied to the sentiment subsisting between an author and his patron. Nash, when dedicating Jack Wilton in 1594 to Southampton, calls him ‘a dear lover . . . of the lovers of poets as of the poets themselves.’