be approximately dated. From 1590-97, Shakespeare's dramatic writing was influenced by lyric ideals of style, predominating in Love's Labour's Lost, the Midsummer-Night's Dream, and Romeo and Juliet. From 1597, this style rapidly gave way to the more nervous and masculine speech of the later Histories and Comedies. There is a strong presumption that the Sonnets-Shakespeare's consummate achievement in lyric poetry-belong to this period of pronounced lyrical energies. In particular, Sonnets 1-XXVI have unmistakable affinities of style and motive with the Venus and Adonis.

The first publisher of the Sonnets printed them, as such collections were commonly printed, in a continuous series, without any outward marks either of connexion or of division. Some critics have supposed the sequence to be wholly arbitrary. But it is clear that there is at least one definite division, at CXXVI. All the Sonnets up to that point are addressed to a youth. Of the remaining twenty-eight, seventeen are addressed to the poet's mistress, and the majority of the rest utter his bitter reflections upon the fatuous passion she has inspired. The fundamental situation is put with the utmost trenchancy in CXLIV :—

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 colour'd ill.

The love of the 'worser spirit' is a love of despair, and the Sonnets inspired by it have a tragic intensity absent from the most despondent of the Sonnets of 'comfort.' The poet loves in spite of his best self, and his intellect is divorced from his love instead of, as in the finest of the earlier series, seeing with

love's eyes and finding in it and through it 'the meaning of all things that are.' Within a smaller compass it strikes more various notes. As it stands it seems devoid of continuity. Its fitful arrangement and spasmodic movement may be partly due to disturbance of the original order; as where two halfplayful pieces, cxxviii and cxxx, are interrupted by the stern solemnity of CXXIX; but it seems rather to reflect the tumult of impulses evoked by a passion in its nature anarchical.

In the first series, on the other hand, a certain continuity is unmistakable, and it is of a kind not at all suggestive of the editorial hand.1 The Sonnets form a succession of groups, some of which were probably continuous poetic epistles, closed with an 'envoy' (cf. XXXII, LV, LXXV, xcvi). The order of the several groups also seems by no means arbitrary. Displacement may be here and there suspected; 2 but on the whole they form a connected sequence, passing by delicate gradations through a rich compass of emotion.

The Sonnets of the opening group (I-XIV) betray the admirer rather than the friend. Their theme accords with their less personal tone. It is not so much in the interest of 'the man right fair' as of the beauty which he 'holds in lease' (XIII) that he bids

him marry and beget offspring in whom it may survive. That the wife might share his friend's heart is a thought at which his affection is not yet arrogant enough to feel any jealous pang. But if his friend rejects that mightier way of immortalising his beauty, then the poet offers his verse, and the humility of the lowly worshipper breaks suddenly into the exultation of the poet who has power to embalm the fading summer of human beauty in the eternity of art (xviii).

At xxvII the exaltation of love begins to be touched with pain, and from this point until c we pass through a region of intricately inwoven light and gloom. At first it is only the pain of absence; a theme which recurs in several later groups. Here it is handled in a mood of exquisitely sensitive meditation: 'When to the sessions of sweet silent thought' (xxx). In XLIII-XLVII the emotion is less keen, the thought more artificial and ingenious; in XCVII-XCIX the sense of longing is almost overpowered by the richness and splendour of the imagery which conveys it. This striking difference in tone favours the view of many critics, that these groups represent three periods of absence. But already in XXXIII a note of sharper suffering is struck. A third person enters the drama, a woman, whose love the poet's friend has won; she happens to be the poet's mistress (XLII), but it is as friend not as lover that he feels the pang: 'That thou hast her, it is not all my grief, That she hath thee, is of my wailing chief.' In LXXVIII-LXXXVI a fourth person is introduced, a rival poet, who spends his might in celebrating Will,' making Shakespeare 'tongue-tied, speaking of your fame!'

To these pangs of wounded love are added other 'strains of woe' less clearly defined and more rarely

touched: discontent with his humble rank and means, public resentment and ill-will (xxIx, xc); the spectacle in the world at large of wrong triumphant over virtue and wisdom, and 'captive good attending captain ill' (LXVI); the sense, quickened by his friend's brilliant adolescence, of the passing away of the glory of his own youth (LXXIII). To these complex griefs the poet of the Sonnets applies two powerful solvents-love and poetry. Sometimes the glory of the lover is uppermost, sometimes the glory of the poet; sometimes they blend. Even in its moments of bitterest disillusion, his love does not cease to be a fascination, nor the monumental phrasing of it a delight. When 'absent' he can revel like the rich man in his treasure, 'The which he will not every hour survey, For blunting the fine point of seldom pleasure' (LII). 'When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,' his soul sings hymns at the thought of his friend's sweet love (xxIx); when grieving for the dead, that thought restores all losses (xxx); when his friend plays him false, he can ignore the momentary 'clouding of his sun' (xxxIII), and exult in his inseparable unity with the friend who has robbed him of his love (XL, XLII). Even his friend's scorn cannot make him disloyal: 'Such is my love, to thee I so belong, That for thy right myself will bear all wrong' (LXXXVIII). Only when utterly driven from his friend's heart will his endurance break down, and then his life will give way too (xcII), unless haply he should live on in ignorance of what he has lost and glory in the beauteous habitation of vice, 'where beauty's veil doth cover every blot' (xcv).

The

And the poet comes in aid of the lover. 'decrepit' poet, 'lame by fortune's dearest spite,' is yet conscious of his own 'better part'; and glories in its power as that which will perpetuate, like the

perfume of dead roses, the 'truth' of the fickle friend (LIV, LV, LX, LXII, LXIII, LXV), and perpetuate himself, after death, in his friend's memory (LXXIV).

If the lover's intoxication gives the climax to the first Absence group (XXVII-XXXII), that of the poet communicates its wonderful rallegrando to the close of the Betrayal-group (XXXIII-LV) which follows; and in the ensuing group (LVII-LXXV), as has been seen, it is a dominant inspiration, culminating once more in the close. In the group beginning at LXXVI the poet takes cognisance of the world's opinion of his poetry, glories in its 'barren monotony,' since 'you and love are still my argument,' and scorns the 'alien pens' which owe all their eloquence to the virtues of their subject (LXIX). But in the final revulsion (LXXXVII) the literary glories of poetry are forgotten it is no more the eternal monument of passion, only its lyric cry. The anguish of the Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing' craves no marble record.

The closing Sonnets of this section leave it doubtful how we are to interpret this farewell. But it was not final, and already the three closing 'Absence' Sonnets (XCVII-XCIX)—if these are rightly placed-with their confident and even playful intimacy, spring like 'a budding morrow' in the midnight of desolation. Yet an interval of silence follows (CIV), and when the poet takes up the pen again, reminiscence of the old intimacy is mingled with pleas for forgiveness. Clearly there was something more than silence to forgive. Courtly chidings of his truant Muse (c, ci), ingenious excuses for neglect (c11), are succeeded by fresh assurances that though he has 'ranged' from his 'home of love' (CIX), 'gone here and there and made myself a motley to the view' (cx), and 'hoisted sail to all the