and these, they assure us, are of deeper significance than any mere poetical exercises can be. They form. a stupendous allegory; they express a profound philosophy. The young friend whom Shakspere addresses is in truth the poet's Ideal Self or Ideal Manhood, or the Spirit of Beauty, or the Reason, or the Divine Logos; his dark mistress, whom a prosaic German translator (Jordan) takes for a mulatto or quadroon, is indeed Dramatic Art, or the Catholic Church, or the Bride of the Canticles, black but comely. Let us not smile too soon at the pranks of Puck among the critics; it is more prudent to move apart and feel gently whether that sleek nole with fair large ears may not have been slipped upon our own shoulders. When we question saner critics why Shakspere's Sonnets may not be at once Dichtung und Wahrheit, poetry and truth, their answer amounts to this: Is it likely that Shakspere would so have rendered extravagant homage to a boy patron? Is it likely that one, who so deeply felt the moral order of the world, would have yielded, as the poems to his dark lady acknowledge, to a vulgar temptation of the senses? or, yielding, would have told his shame in verse? Objections are brought forward against identifying the youth of the Sonnets with Southampton or with Pembroke. It is pointed out that the writer speaks of himself as old, and that in a sonnet published in Shakspere's thirty-fifth year. Here evidently he cannot have spoken in his own person, and if not here, why elsewhere? Finally, it is asserted that the poems lack internal harmony: no real person can be—what Shakspere's friend is described as being-true and false, constant and fickle, virtuous and vicious, of hopeful expectation and publicly blamed for careless living. Shakspere speaks of himself as old. True, but in the sonnet published in The Passionate Pilgrim (cxxXVIII.), he speaks as a lover, contrasting himself skilled in the lore of life with an inexperienced youth. Doubtless at thirty-five he was not a Florizel nor a Ferdinand. In the poems to his friend, Shakspere is addressing a young man perhaps of twenty years, in the fresh bloom of beauty; he celebrates with delight the floral grace of youth, to which the first touch of time will be a taint; those lines of thought and care, which his own mirror shows, bear witness to time's ravage. It is as a poet that Shakspere、 writes, and his statistics are those not of arithmetic but of poetry. That he should have given admiration and love without measure to a youth high born, brilliant, accomplished, who singled out the player for peculiar favour, will seem wonderful only to those who keep a constant guard upon their affections, and to those who have no need to keep a guard at all. In the Renascence epoch, among natural products of a time when life ran swift and free, touching with its current high and difficult places, the ardent friendship of man with man was one. To elevate it above mere personal regard a kind of Neo-Platonism was at hand, which represented Beauty and Love incarnated in a human creature as earthly vicegerents of the Divinity. "It was then not uncommon," observes the sober Dyce, "for one man to write verses to another in a strain of such tender affection as fully warrants us in terming them amatory." Montaigne, not prone to take up extreme positions, writes of his dead Estienne de la Boëtie with passionate tenderness which will not hear of moderation. The haughtiest spirit of Italy, Michael Angelo, does homage to the worth and beauty of young Tommaso Cavalieri in such words as these: Heavenward your spirit stirreth me to strain; Your will includes and is the lord of mine. The learned Languet writes to young Philip Sidney: "Your portrait I kept with me some hours to feast my eyes on it, but my appetite was rather increased than diminished by the sight." And Sidney to his guardian friend: "The chief object of my life, next to the everlasting blessedness of heaven, will always be the enjoyment of true friendship, and there you shall have the chiefest place." The writer of amatory sonnets was expected as a matter of course to express an extravagance of sentiment. But friendship-a marriage of soul with soul-was looked upon as even a more ardent and more transcendent power than love. In Allot's Wit's Commonwealth (1598) we read: "The love of men to women is a thing common and of course, but the friendship of man to man infinite and immortal."1 "Some," said Jeremy Taylor, "live under the line, and the beams of friendship in that position are imminent and perpendicular. Some have only a dark day and a long night from him [the Sun], snows and white cattle, a miserable life and a perpetual harvest of Catarrhes and Consumptions, 1 I find this quotation in Elze's William Shakespeare, p. 497. apoplexies and dead palsies: but some have splendid fires and aromatick spices, rich wines and well-digested fruits, great wit and great courage, because they dwell in his eye and look in his face and are the Courtiers of the Sun, and wait upon him in his Chambers of the East. Just so it is in friendship." Was Shakspere less a courtier of the sun than Languet or Michael Angelo ? 1 If we accept the obvious reading of the Sonnets, we must believe that Shakspere at some time of his life was snared by a woman, the reverse of beautiful according to the conventional Elizabethan standard-dark-haired, dark-eyed, pale-cheeked (CXXXII.); skilled in touching the virginal 1 (CXXVIII.); skilled also in playing on the heart of man; who could attract and repel, irritate and soothe, join reproach with caress (CXLV.); a woman faithless to her vow in wedlock (CLII.). Through her no calm of joy came to him; his life ran quicker but more troubled through her spell, and she mingled strange bitterness with its waters. Mistress of herself and of her art, she turned, when it pleased her, from the player, to capture a 1 In Much Ado about Nothing (II. iii.), Benedick describes the woman whom he may love: "Of good discourse, an excellent musician, and her hair shall be of what colour it please God." Hermann Isaac notices that in the old play, The Taming of a Shrew, Katharine is a blonde beauty. Ferando (Shakspere's Petruchio) describes her: 1 more distinguished prize, his friend. For a while Shakspere was kept in the torture of doubt and suspicion; then confession and tears were offered by the youth. The wound had gone deep into Shakspere's heart : Love knows it is a greater grief To bear love's wrong than hate's known injury. But, delivering himself from the intemperance of wrath, he could forgive a young man beguiled and led astray. Through further difficulties and estrangements their friendship travelled on to a fortunate repose. The series of Sonnets, which is its record, climbs to a high sunlit resting-place. The other series, which records his passion for a dark temptress, is a whirl of moral chaos. Whether to dismiss him, or to draw him farther on, the woman had urged upon him the claims of conscience and duty. In the latest sonnets-if this series be arranged in chronological order-Shakspere's passion, grown bitter and scornful (CLI., CLII.), strives, once for all, to defy and wrestle down his better will. Shakspere of the Sonnets is not the Shakspere serenely victorious, infinitely charitable, wise with all wisdom of the 'intellect and the heart, whom we know through The Tempest and King Henry VIII. He is the Shakspere of Venus and Adonis and Romeo and Juliet, on his way to acquire some of the dark experience of Measure for Measure, and the bitter learning of Troilus and Cressida. Shakspere's writings assure us that in the main his eye was fixed on the true ends of life, but they do not lead us to believe that he was inaccessible to temptations of the senses, the heart, and the imagination. We can only |