“I heard a mermaid, on a dolphin’s back,
    Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath,
    That the rude sea grew civil at her song.”

And all are no doubt aware that the subsequent lines, referring to “a fair vestal throned by the west,” are commonly understood to have been meant as a piece of delicate flattery to Queen Elizabeth.  Mr. Halpin has recently given to this famous passage a new interpretation or application, which is at least curious enough to justify a brief statement of it.  In his view, “Cupid all arm’d” refers to Leicester’s wooing of Elizabeth, and his grand entertainment of her at Kenilworth in 1575.  From authentic descriptions of that entertainment we learn, that among the spectacles and fireworks witnessed on the occasion was one of a singing mermaid on a dolphin’s back gliding over smooth water amid shooting stars.  The “love-shaft” which was aimed at the “fair vestal,” that is, the Priestess of Diana, whose bud has such prevailing might over “Cupid’s flower,” glanced off; so that “the imperial votaress passed on, in maiden meditation, fancy-free.”

Thus far, all is clear enough.  But Halpin further interprets that the “little western flower” upon whom “the bolt of Cupid fell” refers to Lettice Countess of Essex, with whom Leicester carried on a secret intrigue while her husband was absent in Ireland.  The Earl of Essex, on being apprised of the intrigue, set out to return the next year, but died of poison, as was thought, before he reached home.  So Halpin understands the “western flower, before milk-white,” that is, innocent, but “now purple with love’s wound,” as referring to the lady’s fall, or to the deeper blush of her husband’s murder.  And the flower is called “love-in-idleness,” to signify her listlessness of heart during the Earl’s absence; as the Poet elsewhere uses similar terms of the pansy, as denoting the love that renders men pensive, dreamy, indolent, instead of toning up the soul with healthy and noble aspirations.  The words of Oberon to Puck, “that very time I saw—­but thou could’st not,” are construed as referring to the strict mystery in which the affair was wrapped, and to the Poet’s own knowledge of it, because a few years later the execution of Edward Arden, his maternal relative, was closely connected with it, and because the unfortunate Earl of Essex, so well known as for some time the Queen’s favourite, and then the victim of her resentment, was the son of that Lettice, and was also the Poet’s early friend and patron.

Such is, in substance, Halpin’s view of the matter; which I give for what it may be worth; and freely acknowledge it to be ingenious and plausible enough.  Gervinus regards it as “an interpretation full of spirit,” and as “giving the most definite relation to the innermost sense of the whole piece.”  And I am very willing to believe that Shakespeare often took hints, perhaps something more than hints, for his poetry from the facts and