the hair on his head is luxuriant. It
is worn very long, and falls over and below the shoulder. The colour is
now of walnut, but was originally of lighter tint.

[Picture: Henry Wriothesley]

The portrait depicting Southampton five or six years later shows him in
prison, to which he was committed after his secret marriage in 1598. A
cat and a book in a jewelled binding are on a desk at his right hand.
Here the hair falls over both his shoulders in even greater profusion,
and is distinctly blonde. The beard and thin upturned moustache are of
brighter auburn and fuller than before, although still slight. The blue
eyes and colouring of the cheeks show signs of ill-health, but differ
little from those features in the earlier portrait.

From either of the two Welbeck portraits of Southampton might Shakespeare
have drawn his picture of the youth in the Sonnets. Many times does he
tell us that the youth is fair in complexion, and that his eyes are fair.
In Sonnet lxviii., when he points to the youth's face as a map of what
beauty was 'without all ornament, itself and true'--before fashion
sanctioned the use of artificial 'golden tresses'--there can be little
doubt that he had in mind the wealth of locks that fell about
Southampton's neck. {146b}

Sonnet cvii. the last of the series.

A few only of the sonnets that Shakespeare addressed to the youth can be
allotted to a date subsequent to 1594; only two bear on the surface signs
of a later composition. In Sonnet lxx. the poet no longer credits his
hero with juvenile wantonness, but with a 'pure, unstained prime,' which
has 'passed by the ambush of young days.' Sonnet cvii., apparently the
last of the series, was penned almost a decade after the mass of its
companions, for it makes references that cannot be mistaken to three
events that took place in 1603--to Queen Elizabeth's death, to the
accession of James I, and to the release of the Earl of Southampton, who
had been in prison since he was convicted in 1601 of complicity in the
rebellion of the Earl of Essex. The first two events are thus described:

The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured
And the sad augurs mock their own presage;
Incertainties now crown themselves assured
And peace proclaims olives of endless age.

Allusion to Elizabeth's death.

It is in almost identical phrase that every pen in the spring of 1603 was
felicitating the nation on the une