be found in a comparative study of sonnet-writing in Shakespeare's time. The great majority of students have been forced to the conclusion that, while the conventional spirit and method of contemporary sonneteers had a distinct influence upon the poet so far as form and manner were concerned, the content of the Sonnets had a vital relation to his own experience. This conclusion is based upon the fact that a note of reality seems to be distinctly sounded in the series; that they tell a story or reveal an experience which is definitely outlined notwithstanding the mask of conventional imagery and phraseology which the poet employed; that throughout the entire body of his dramatic work he uniformly and consistently keeps in touch with reality, using historic material whenever he can find it adaptable for his purpose, and allying himself, apparently by instinct as well as by intention, with the force which resides in real things or in the deep and rich deposit of the imagination dealing, as in such figures as Hamlet or Prospero, with the greatest realities of experience; that in the sensitiveness, the capacity for devotion, the power of passion, which the Sonnets reveal they so entirely express the nature of Shakespeare that they must be accepted as, in a true sense, autobiographic.

Those who regard the Sonnets as pure and deliberate autobiography, containing a definite confession to be literally interpreted, probably stray as far from the truth as those who dissociate the poet entirely from his work and regard the Sonnets as technical exercises only. The habit of the age and the marked and con

sistent objectivity of Shakespeare's mode of expression make it highly improbable that he laid his heart bare by putting in historic order and with entire fidelity of detail a passional experience which had searched his spirit as with a lighted torch held aloft in the darkest recesses of his nature.

The truth probably lies between these two extremes of interpretation; it seems probable that the Sonnets are disclosures of the poet's experience without being transcriptive of his actual history; that they embody the fruits of a great experience without revealing that experience in its historic order. Literal, consecutive recitals of fact the Sonnets are not, but they are autobiographic in the only way in which a poet of Shakespeare's spirit and training, living in his period, could make his art the vehicle of autobiography: they use the material which experience had deposited in Shakespeare's nature, but they hide the actual happenings in his life behind the veil of an elaborate art and of a philosophy with which the thought of western Europe was saturated in his time. The Sonnets may be read as the poetic record of an emotional experience which left lasting traces behind it, and as a disclosure of the mind of the poet; but they cannot be safely read as an exact record of fact. The poet, as Shelley suggests, was willing to intrust his secret to those who had the wit to understand it.

The dedication of the Sonnets was written, not by their author, but by their publisher, and has furnished material for one of the most extensive of the many controversies which have centred about Shakespeare:

In these words Thomas Thorpe, not Shakespeare, addressed a patron whom the research and acumen of many decades of investigation and speculation have not been able to identify to the satisfaction of a majority of students. For many years the claims of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, were urged with great ingenuity and with considerable success. This young nobleman was a representative man of the close of the Elizabethan epoch. Clarendon describes him as "very well bred, and of excellent parts, and a graceful speaker upon any subject, having a good proportion of Learning, and a ready Wit to apply it and enlarge upon it; of a pleasant and facetious humour, and a disposition affable, generous, and magnificent." The "dark lady" was identified with Mary Fitton, who was a Maid of Honour to the Queen, of a gay and pleasure-loving disposition, on very friendly terms with some of the players of Shakespeare's company, of free manners and easy morals, who was finally

driven from the Court by the results of her intimacy with the Earl of Pembroke. The claims of Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, the brilliant and popular courtier, scholar, soldier, and patron of the theatre, to whom Shakespeare dedicated "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece," have been presented with much force. Many facts in the careers of the Earl of Southampton and of the Earl of Pembroke meet the requirements of the few and uncertain biographical data furnished by the Sonnets; but the acceptance of either of these noblemen as the "W. H." of the dedication raises almost as many questions as it

answers.

It is highly improbable that a dedication written by the publisher of a collection of poems, which he was about to issue without authorization, would disclose the identity of the chief figure in the drama of passion guarded in its record by the most highly conventionalized poetic form of the age. It is more probable that such a dedication would be addressed to a possible patron of the volume or to a personal friend of the publishersome such person as the printer, William Hall, whose claims to the mysterious initials "W. H." Mr. Lee has brought forward as the most recent contribution to a discussion which will never, in all probability, be finally settled, and which turns, in any event, upon a matter which is solely one of intelligent curiosity.

The supreme value of the Sonnets lies in their beauty and completeness as works of art. They disclose marked inequalities of inspiration and of

workmanship; in some cases they are prime examples of the strained imagery, the forced fancy, the artificial style, of the Elizabethan sonneteer; but again and again in the noble sequence the poet blends experience, philosophy, and the most sorely over-used poetic form of his time in a harmonious whole which appeals with equal power to the intellect and to the sense of beauty. The artificial frame of fourteen lines becomes fluid in his hand; the emotion which penetrates and irradiates it rises out of the depths of his nature; and both are touched with the inimitable magic of the poet's imagination.

The volume in which the Sonnets were published in 1609 contained a detached poem of forty-nine stanzas in the metre of "The Rape of Lucrece," in which the sorrows of a young girl, betrayed and deserted by her lover, are set forth in the gentle, tender, melodious manner of Spenser. Of "A Lover's Complaint" nothing further is known than this fact. It has no relationship with the Sonnets, and is in a wholly different key; but there is no reason why Shakespeare should not have written it in the early lyrical period. Its appearance with the Sonnets makes it highly probable that it was in circulation among Shakespeare's friends in manuscript and was secured by Thorpe in the same way in which copies of the Sonnets were obtained. The poem is in the manner of the conventional pastoral so popular at the same time, and is pervaded by an air of quiet melancholy and gentle beauty. Complaints were sung in many keys by the Elizabethan poets, and "A Lover's Com