No more be grieved at that which thou hast Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud; That I an acces ory needs must be To that sweet thief which sourly robs from (35) me. Those pretty wrongs that liberty commits That thou hast her, it is not all my grief; And for my sake even so do'h she abuse me, Both find each other, and I lose both twain, ELIZABETH VERNON TO HER COUSIN LADY RICH. Beshrew that heart that makes my heart to groan For that deep wound it gives my Friend and me! Is it not enough to torture me alone, But slave to slavery my sweet'st Friend must Me from myself thy cruel rye hath taken, bail; Whoe'er keeps me, let my heart be his guard; So, now I have confessed that he is thine, (42) The statue of thy beauty thou wilt take, He pays the whole, and yet I am not free. (134) Take all my loves, my Love, yea, take them all, What hast thou then more than thou hadst before? No Love! my Love, that thou may'st true love call, All mine was thine, before thou hadst this more: Then if for my love thou my Love receivest, Lascivious Grace, in whom all ill well shows, As the reader will perceive, two of the "Latter Sonnets" have here been brought forward; but in grouping these Sonnets together I am not trying to steal any advantage over my opponents, nor am I loading the dice on purpose to play falsely. I was not the first to recognize a relationship in these Sonnets which proves that there has been a change of places. Gervinus, followed by others, admits the relationship of these groups, only he would drag Sonnets 40-2 into the back slums of the Latter Sonnets,-not knowing what else to make of them; whereas I bring two of the Latter Sonnets (three altogether) forward, and am able to offer the best of reasons for so doing. The comparison already made points to their alignment with plays that were far earlier than the time of the Latter Sonnets (see p. 43). We are in agreement then with Gervinus as to their relationship, although differing completely as to the story they have to tell. According to the Autobiographical interpretation, it has been assumed that Shakspeare having a wife at Stratford, also kept a mistress in London, this being the bestializing Circe who is described in the Latter Sonnets as an adulteress in the very "refuse of her deeds;" foul with all unfaithfulness in marriage, the breaker of her own "bed-vow," who had "robbed others' beds' revenues of their rents," and who was so public a prostitute that she could be called the "bay where all men ride," the "wide world's common place." This is the woman who, as they say, seduced Shakspeare's young friend from his side and thus caused the Poet to suffer a "hell of time" in purging fires. Mr. Furnivall asserts that in Sonnets 40-2 "Will has taken away Shakspeare's mistress,” although he tells us a few lines later on, that in Sonnets 66-70, "Shakspeare is SURE he is PURE, and excuses him!" This "Will," as previously shown, is an impostor of their own manufacture. It is a lying delusion to assert or suppose that any person named "Will" is addressed in the Sonnets from the first to the final one. And if the young friend of the Poet did steal his mistress, it must of necessity have been the man whose poet he was, the man who "made the dumb on high to sing," the living original of Shakspeare's Adonis, that is, the Earl of Southampton, as already established by data the most definite and indubitable. However, this is a fact the autobiographists will not, dare not, look in the face. Now, if there were any grounds for such a story, we are bound not to shirk it. We ought not to lie about Shakspeare because we love him. We should have no right to alter any known fact of his life. It might have been pleasant too could we have proved that he had such failings and errors as afforded a satisfactory set-off to his splendour-the foil which should render his glory less dazzling to weak eyes. There are tastes that would have appreciated his fame all the more for a taint in it! Besides, we all know what mad things love has done in this world; that while it can see so clearly on behalf of others, it is so often blind for self. We know how this passion has coloured some lump of common earth; how it has clothed spiritual deformity with splendour and grace; how it has discrowned the kingly men and made fools of the wise ones; snatched the empire of a world from Antony; made great heroes lay down their heads and leave their laurels in a wanton's lap; set the wits of many a poor poet dancing like those of a lunatic. As Armado reminds us, "Sampson was so tempted, and he had an excellent strength; Solomon was so seduced, and he had a very good wit." Shakspeare with his ripe physical nature, fine animal spirits, and magnificent pulse of rich life, might have been one victim more. It might have been possible for this soaring spirit to be 1 Leopold Shakspeare, Introd., n. 65. I sensually subdued by some witty wanton, and transformed for a time into one of the wallowers in her sty. 66 So many apparent possibilities go to make up the world of might-have-been ! Let us admit the possibility. He might have been. But was he, and has he left the evidence for a conviction? Has he written Sonnets to record the mutual shame of himself and that friend whom he professed to love with a love passing the love of woman," and strove to image forth for endless honour? Did he play the pimp to his own dishonour, as the personal reading of this group of Sonnets would imply? Was he such a stark fool in his confessions as the one-eyed folk assume who cannot distinguish his mask from his face, nor his personality from the part he played? Men may do such things as have been surmised of Shakspeare and his friend, but only Cretins assume that he would have put them into Sonnets to "please these curious days." But what we are called upon to question here is not Shakspeare's falsehood, to wife or self or friend, or that friend's falsehood to him when he, the friend, was devotedly in love with Elizabeth Vernon; such hypothetical trifles may be thrown in. What we are concerned with first and foremost is the falsehood to nature that would be perpetrated by this our greatest of all human naturalists, in making pleas so second-childishly puerile and excuses so false and foolish, if this were a matter between man and man, and he and Southampton were the two men. Let us for the moment suppose the lying story true. How then should Shakspeare be the first to attack his friend when he had been the foremost to go astray? How could he blame him for permitting the "base clouds" and "rotten smoke" to hide his morning brightness, taunt him with sneaking to westward with "this disgrace," hold him responsible for the "base clouds" overtaking himself, and tell him that tears of repentance would be of no avail, that HIS shame could not "give physic" to Shakspeare's grief, for no one could speak well of such a "salve" as that which might heal the wound but could never "cure the disgrace"? How could he thus throw such puerile and petulant exclamations at the Earl, his young friend, had he been the older sinner? But for his own connection with the woman, his friend would not have been brought within reach of her snares. It would be his own baseness that made the Earl's deception possible. It was he who had let the base clouds overtake both. The youth could only have loosely "strayed" where the man of years had first deliberately gone. The friend would see what a pretty comment this was on that "husbandry in honour" which the Poet had urged so eloquently, if he thus admitted that he was living in such dishonour. The falsehood of falsehoods would be Shakspeare's own, his would be the baseness, black beyond comparison, the disgrace that was past all cure. After the death of Tybalt, Romeo, fearing the effect on Juliet, asks "Does she not think me an old murderer, Now I have stained the childhood of our joy?" feeling that this blot of blood on the newly-turned leaf of his life has soaked backwards through the whole book. So must the Poet have felt if the Earl had discovered any such black stain in his character; if he had found that all the professions of love, sole and eternal, whispered in private and proclaimed in public, were totally false; if he had proved his vaunted singleness in love to be a most repulsive specimen of double-dealing. With what conscience could the Poet turn round when caught by the friend, who had only followed his footsteps, and upbraid him for the disgrace to himself, the treachery to their friendship? If he had not had a mistress he would not have lost a friend. Or how could he reproach his friend with breaking a "two-fold truth". "Hers, by thy beauty tempting her to thee; Thine, by thy beauty being false to me," whilst ignoring his own breach of the moral law and the marriage tie? The Earl would know what a double-dyed sinner he was; he would see through the moral blasphemy of his solemn twaddle. He would appreciate the value of his arguments for marriage, and his consecration of their friendship, when thus illustrated. He would see how apposite was the exclamation, "Ah me, but yet thou might'st, MY Seat, forbear," and chide him for the "pretty wrongs comImitted when he was "sometime absent" from the Earl's heart, IF this absence was for such a purpose. If the story had been true, then the position taken by the Poet would be utterly fatal, and the arguments foolishly false. It would be the hardened sinner obviously playing the part of the injured innocent; every charge he makes against his friend cuts double-edged against himself. How could he dare to speak of the Earl's "sensual fault," and talk of bringing in sense, to look on this weakness of his friend's nature in a sensible way, if he himself had been doing secret wrong to his own reputation, his dear friendship, his wife, his little ones? How could he thus patronize his frail friend who knew that the speaker was far frailer? How should he say, "no more be grieved at that which thou hast done," and try to make excuses for him, if he himself had done that which was infinitely worse? The Earl might weep, and the Poet might speak of the tears as rich enough to ransom all his ill-deeds; but they would not redeem the character of Shakspeare; the friend, with all his repentance, could never have cured the married man's disgrace. He might affect to speak of the Earl's doings as "pretty wrongs" that befitted his years, but his own sins could not be looked on as " pretty"; these could not in any sense befit his own years. How should Shakspeare ask "Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day, It is not possible for any man to ask such a question under the circumstances supposed. It would be too barefaced a bit of hypocrisy! His cloak! Why, he would have been travelling forth in the cloak of a hideous and disgusting disguise. He would be a lecher cloaking himself in a demure morality. Shakspeare, were he the speaker, could not have travelled forth without his cloak, it would have clung only too near to nature. Such a method of treating the whole matter would be a blunder worse than the crime. "And yet thou might'st MY Seat forbear! Do you think, now, men or women, that Shakspeare, all alive as he was to an incongruity, the quickest part of whose self-consciousness was his active sense of the ridiculous, would, in the circumstances postulated, claim that "seat" of baseness as his very own, and his only? He would be the last man to overlook the fact that he could claim no private or personal proprietorship in a woman so notoriously public as the Latter Sonnets paint her. She has been false to her husband's bed (152), not in relation to one person merely, for she has "robbed others' beds' revenues of their rents" (142). She is described as being all too common for one man to claim or re-claim her as his own. Shakspeare was somewhat learned in the law of property, and quite familiar with the distinction betwixt that which was several and common property. And the question is very naturally asked (Sonnet 137)— "Why should my heart think that a several plot, Which my heart knows the wide world's common place?" Why indeed? And therefore why write Sonnets to claim it as several? Why resent the intrusion of a friend to the grazing-ground on a world-wide common? Also, it is ludicrously impossible for a woman so notoriously public and depraved to have abused one friend by suffering the other to test and prove her, or her truth to him! (Sonnet 42.) And therefore why blubber about it, and stand in tears self-pilloried in public for the amusement, disgust, or scorn of those who were to read the Sonnets which were written in the friend's album to pleas those "curious days"? Shakspeare is supposed to be speaking of or to the same woman in the following manner Surely if the speaker had been a married man, there could have been no need of charging himself with that one least fault in the world, an overmuch charity in construing; "himself corrupting" by his large liberality towards his friend. He need not have sought for so far-fetched a fault as that of straining a point in excusing his friend's sins, because "all men make faults," and " EVEN I in this," that is in being so very charitable; the only fault of which the speaker is conscious! A married man could not charge the single one with his shame for what he had done being inadequate to give physic to his grief. Nor could he make that appeal to the public, "for no man well of such a salve can speak," if he were known to be a married man who had been found out in keeping a mistress. It would not be the salve of which men would speak, but the moral sore! The attitude, the arguments, the personal consciousness, are all wrong when applied to a man who would be himself compromised; they are only possible to an innocent woman. Nowhere do we meet the blinking glance of conscious guilt; but at every turn of the subject the clear straight-forward look of honest love. Whatsoever the exact meaning or amount of the charges, there is no hint here of the speaker's being guilty of the like or of any kindred offence against morality. The speaker is the victim and not the cause of shame, and |