and buries the whole of the facts that are of the greatest "pith and moment" in any attempt to understand the Sonnets. Before passing on I will make one more comparative parallel. The following four Sonnets are all supposed to be Autobiographical, and therefore spoken by Shakspeare to the same friend, although, as the reader will feel, they are diametrically opposite in character.

Let not my love be called idolatry,
Nor my beloved as an idol show,
Since all alike my songs and praises be
To one, of one, still such, and ever so.
Kind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind, '
Still constant in a wondrous excellence,
Therefore my verse to constancy confined,
One thing expressing, leaves out difference.
Fair, kind, and true, is all my argument,
Fair, kind, and true, varying to other words,
And in this change is my invention spent,
Three themes in one, which wondrous scope
affords.

Fair, kind, and true, have often lived alone,
Which three, till now, never kept seat in
(105)

one.

SONNETS NOT SPOKEN BY
SHAKSPEARE.

Dramatic.

When in disgrace with Fortune, and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends pos-
sessed,

Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on Thee,- and then my state,
Like to the Lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at Heaven's
gate;

For thy sweet love remembered such wealth
brings,

That then I scorn to change my state with
kings.
(29)

Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still,
The better angel is a man right fair:
The worser spirit a woman coloured ill.
To win me soon to hell my female evil
Tempteth my better angel from my side,
And would corrupt my saint to be a devil;
Wooing his purity with her foul pride.
And whether that my angel be turned fiend,
Suspect I may, yet not directly tell,
But being both from me both to each friend,
I guess one angel in another's hell:

Yet this shall I ne'er know but live in doubt,
Till my bad angel fire my good one out.
(144)

Now, let any one look back at the two Sonnets, Nos. 29 and 32, and compare them. They were written by the greatest dramatist who ever portrayed human character or distinguished its opposite traits. They come quite near together in the first series, but the characters of the two speakers are totally antipodal. Sonnet 32 is spoken by Shakspeare himself as the lover of his friend and the writer of the Sonnets. He is happy in his work, in his lot, in his love; standing looking mentally from the end of it, he describes his life as a "well-contented day." The other speaker is unhappy in all things, and discontented with everything. He is in disgrace with fortune, and his disgrace is public. He is an outcast in exile, a lonely, discontented, miserable man. These are not two moods merely of the same mind; they are two entirely distinct characters, which

can be identified with two different persons; one Sonnet being personal, the other dramatic. In Sonnet 29 the speaker is "in disgrace with Fortune and ren's eyes." In Sonnet 37 he is "made lame by Fortune's dearest spite." In Sonnet 90 the "world is bent" upon "crossing his deeds," and he is still suffering the "spite of Fortune" at its worst. In Sonnet 124 he says

"If my dear love were but the Child of State,

It might for Fortune's bastard be unfathered."

This long war of Fortune cannot be made personal to Shakspeare, who was a favourite of Fortune, knew it, and acknowledges it in these Sonnets when he speaks for himself. Such cursing of Fate and Fortune as we find in certain Sonnets is sternly rebuked by Friar Lawrence in the case of Romeo under circumstances desperate enough to excuse an outbreak.

"Why rail'st thou on thy birth, the heaven, the earth?
Since birth and heaven and earth all three do meet
In thee at once, which thou at once would'st lose.
Fie, fie! thou sham'st thy shape, thy love, thy wit,
Which like an Usurer abound'st in all,

And usest none in that true use indeed

Which should bedeck thy shape, thy love, thy wit.
Thy noble shape is but a form of wax,
Digressing from the valour of a man.'

We hear the voice of Shakspeare in the Friar rather than in Romeo.

Professor Dowden, who contends that the Sonnets stand in their true order, likewise claims that these two belong to the first group, as there is no break until we get beyond the 32nd Sonnet, so that both these Sonnets go together and were sent together as internal revelations from this man who tells his friend that he lives a "well-contented day," at the very time that he is supposed to deny it altogether, and to give us all these cumulative details in direct disproof! Professor Dowden has supplemented Brown's Autobiographical interpretation by one unique discovery that is entirely his own. He contends for the Personal Theory, and when speaking more especially of the Latter Sonnets he says, “I believe that Shakspeare's Sonnets express his feelings in his own person. To whom they were addressed is unknown. We shall never discover the name of that woman who for a season could sound, as no one else, the instrument in Shakspeare's heart from the lowest note to the top of the compass. To the eyes of no diver among the wrecks of time will that curious talisman gleam" (p. 33). A person of the name of "Will" Is the SPEAKER in four different Sonnets (Nos. 57, 135, 136, and 143), and if the Sonnets are read as personal utterances of Shakspeare, it inevitably follows that he is the speaker whose name is "Will." From that conclusion there is no escape. Thus "Will" Is the speaker of Sonnets 57, 135, 136, and 143; the speaker mark! NOT THE FRIEND ADDRESSED, nor the person spoken of, as the subject of the Latter Sonnets is a woman in relation to "Will"! So that these four Sonnets must be spoken by Shakspeare for him to "express his own feelings in his own person." If any other "Will" than Shakspeare is admitted as speaker, that would necessitate my dramatic theory which the Professor opposes. "Will" then is the speaker addressing or speaking of the woman! Yet Professor Dowden asserts (p. 51) that it is Shakspeare's friend (not himself) who is called "Will" in Sonnet 135. If it

D

were Shakspeare's friend who is the "Will" of these four Sonnets, he must be the 1 speaker of them, and so they would not and could not then be personal to Shakspeare himself! You cannot have one "Will" both ways-"Will" as speaker and "Will" as the friend addressed-when there is but one! From the beginning to the end of the Sonnets there is but ONE "Will"; in each case he is the speaker, and nowhere is he the person who is spoken to! Professor Dowden has actually transmogrified this "Will" the speaker into Shakspeare's friend "Will" in support of "Will" Herbert's be:ng that friend. He says, "To avoid the confusion of he and him, I call Shakspeare's friend as he is called in 135, Will" (p. 51).

The reader will find nothing of the kind either in Sonnet 135 or in the other three which go with it and are spoken by the person who tells us that his own name (not his friend's) is "Will." No student of the Sonnets will take it otherwise unless blinded through believing a lie. "Will❞—whoever he may be -is the speaker by name in four of the Sonnets, and never is he the friend addressed by Shakspeare in any of his Sonnets!

Therefore the assumption that the friend who is addressed by Shakspeare was "Will" by name has no basis or warrant whatever except in the blunder now exposed, a blunder so gross that it may seem incredible as it is inexplicable; and, for a commentator and critic to commit it, is suicidal. This irreparable mistake is all that Messrs. Dowden and Furnivall ever had to go upon in foisting the name of "Will" upon their readers as that of Shakspeare's friend in the earlier Sonnets. I repeat, this "Will" who speaks and puns on his own name in the Latter Sonnets is Professor Dowden's sole evidence that the earlier 126 Sonnets are addressed to "Will"! Nevertheless the falsification has been built

upon as a foundational fact. Mr. Furnivall, for example, says, "that the W (of Thorpe's Inscription) was Will,' we know from Sonnets 135, 136, 143." He further affirms that "in Sonnets 38 and 78 Shakspeare's verse is said to be solely begotten by Will." This, as the reader will see by referring to those two Sonnets, is simply to convert the false inference into a conclusion that is sought to be established by downright dishonesty of manipulation. Whilst Professor Dowden, as already shown, is so well satisfied with his suicidal assumption that he can say, "to avoid confusion of HE and HIM I call Shakspeare's friend (all through the Sonnets) as he is called in 135, Will.'”

6

This is trying to pass off a counterfeit coinage, none the less false because it is literary. And by such false coinage, by such a false reading and a falser inference, "Will" Herbert is to be changed into the young friend of Shakspeare, for whom he wrote his early Sonnets, and thus foisted into the seat of Southampton! This attempt to change "Will" the speaker into "Will" as the person addressed is a palpable perversion of the plainest fact.

Of course if "Will" Herbert can only be hoisted into Southampton's place, it makes the story of lechery and treachery look a little less improbable on account of Herbert's well-known licentious character! For if Shakspeare can be made to reflect or share the character of Herbert, it will look a little more likely that Herbert my have shared in Shakspeare's mistress-as they swear he did. Whereas, if it be proved that Southampton was the "sweet boy," the Adonis of Shakspeare's Sonnets, the same friend in private who afterwards became his patron publicly, then the lie of the libellers falls dead and damned: (1) because Southampton was purely and profoundly in love with Elizabeth

Vernon; (2) because the subjects and arguments were supplied by the friend and lover; and (3) because the Sonnets were to be written in the lover's own book, and remain in the sight of the Private Friends (Sonnet 38).

If William Herbert is NOT the young friend addressed by Shakspeare in the first 126 Sonnets, it follows that all the hypotheses based on the false assumption must fall with it! Thorpe's Inscription may be left aside for the present. It would be worse than useless to begin with that which never has supplied and never can supply the key that Thorpe himself did not possess. The Sonnets must furnish their clue to his enigmatical dedication, which has been a most disastrous guide, as of the blind leading the blind.

Michael Drayton did not bequeath to us many memorable lines, but he says in one of the few he left,

"Blind is that sight that's with another's eye."

Now I do not ask the students of Shakspeare's Sonnets to see with my eyes, but to keep their own well open and fixed steadily on all the facts as they are presented to them piecemeal, and examine them one by one as if they were under the microscope, to make all sure before they accompany me any further. Let us take the necessary time to see our way clearly step by step with our own eyes; leap to no hasty conclusions, and accept nothing upon trust, nothing upon a mere basis of belief. It was a very long and close study of such matterful and causeful lines as cannot be made personal to Shakspeare, nor be invisibly evaporated as abstract ideas, a very diligent course of

Minding true things by what their mockeries be,"

that first opened my own eyes to let fall the scales imposed upon them by nonuse through trusting to the eyes of others.

We live in a time when the old manufactories of Opinion are well-nigh ground out. People who think do not ask for opinions ready-made. Give them the original facts, and they can form their own opinions from a first-hand acquaintanceship. That is the only way to attain the truth. And in the present case there is no possible way of attaining the truth concerning Shakspeare and his Sonnets without being in possession of those definite data which alone constitute the criteria of the truth. I fully acknowledge holding a brief on Shakspeare's behalf. Nevertheless I shall present the evidence entire all through my long and elaborate argument; " Ay, and the particular confirmation, point by point, to the full arming of the verity." My appeal is addressed to readers who learn by in-ight rather than trust to hearsay.

PRIMARY FACTS AND FUNDAMENTAL FALLACIES.

THEORIZERS who seek to establish and perpetuate the belief that "William Herbert" was the "Only Begetter" or objective inspirer of Shakspeare's Sonnets, as lumped together by Thorpe in his Inscription, are forced to ignore the most vital internal evidence and blink the most conclusive external data. Evidence within the Sonnets and from without; evidence poetic and historic; evidence the most positive and irrefutable, can be offered to show that the mass of them (at least the first 86 as they stand) were composed at a period too early for William Herbert to have been the young friend who was so beloved by Shakspeare, and the patron to whom the Poet sent his earliest Sonnets, written by his "Pupil Pen," to "witness duty," to identify his present and to promise him his future work. It is not what I may say, or Messrs. Brown, Dowden, and Furnivall may surmise or profess to believe, but what are the facts of the case to be found in the Sonnets, corroborated by the testimony outside of them? Is there any rock of reality on which we can build the bridge to cross a chasm hitherto impassable?

At the outset the Sonnets plainly tell us that they had no " Only Begetter" in the sense of one sole inspirer, seeing that both sexes are addressed in them; and both sexes must include at least two persons! Next they inform us, with Shakspeare for speaker, that many of them were written by the Poet with his "Pupil Pen" before he had appeared in print with his Venus and Adonis in the year 1593. The 26th Sonnet is perfectly explicit on that point.

"Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage
Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit,
To thee I send this written embassage,
To witness duty, not to show my wit:

Duty so great which wit so poor as mine

May make seem bare, in wanting wor is to show it;

But that I hope some good conceit of thine

In thy soul's thought, all naked, wil bestow it:

Till whatsoever star that guides my moving

Points on me graciously with fair aspect,

And puts apparel on my tattered loving,

To show me worthy of thy sweet respect:
Then may I dare to boast how I do love thee;

Till then, not show my head where thou mayst prove me."

One's vision must be very confused or obstructed by the subjective blinkers of a false belief not to see that this was written and sent in MS. to the friend addressed before the writer had published anything, that is, before the year 1593, when William Herbert was just thirteen years of age. Also, nothing can be more certain than that this was written and sent to the frien 1, who was his patron at that time, that is before 1593, with its kindred and accompanying group of Sonnets, which are referred to previously (Sonnet 23) as his "Books"; Books intended to plead silently for the patron's love until such time as he can boast of his friendship publicly.

It is equally evident that Shakspeare did not know exactly where his success was to be won, or how his " moving" on his course would be guided, when this