Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems

ys and poems. I am aware that any question or discussion as to their authorship is regarded with objection or impatience by very many. But to those not friendly to any such inquiry I would say, let u

et or Rosalind, do we not owe it to the poet whose embodiments or creations they are, that we should study his character in the only

for a people who, in the main, on all those subjects knew or believed as did their author. And it is both curious and instructive to note how much information as to that distant period Mr. Gladstone was able to gather from the circumstances, incidents, and implications of the Hom

s the poetry indicates. But we may fairly take as correct what he says of his friend or of himself, as to their relations and companions

redited to him are plays of a lower order, which certainly are not from the same author as the remainder, and especially the greater plays. In this widely different and lower class, criticism seems to be agreed in placing the greater portion of Pericles, Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, two parts of Henry VI., and Henry VIII.[1] In addition to those, there are at least ten plays not now published as Sha

their creator; but in the Sonnets his own is the character whose thoughts and emotions are stated. There we come nearest to him; and there it would seem that we should be able to learn very much of him. Perhaps we shall find that they do not present him at his best; it may be that they were intended only for the eye of the friend or patron to whom they are addressed. Perhaps they reveal the raveled sleeve, the anxieties of a straitened life and of

what, if anything, there is, distinctive of our great poet,

tes an extraordinary significance to his words"; and further, that "he had the

the song of the nightingale "on yond' pomegranate tree" is but an incident to the soft, warm and love- inviting night; Rosalind moves and talks to the quickstep of the forest; in Macbeth the incantation of the witches is but the outward expression of an overmastering fate, whose presence is felt throughout the play. Let us then, in studying the Sonnets, consider that they are from the same great master as the dramas. And we shall be thus prepared, where the meaning seems plain and obvious, to believe that the writer meant what he said, and to reject any interpretation whic

d to be an invocation to Cupid.[3] That seems to me to destro

vely boy, who

fickle glass, h

it indicates that, though but for a little while, Nature has lifted him to an attribute of immortality. The latter interpretation makes the poet enlarge and glorify his subject; the former makes him belittle it, and bring the god of love to the audit of age and the ravage of wrinkles. This is the last sonnet of the first series; with the next begins the series relating to his mistress. Reading it

says: "The natural sense, I am convinced, is the true one."[4] Hallam says: "No one can doubt that they express not only real but intense emotions of the heart."[5] Professor Tyler, in a work relating to the Sonnets, says: "The impress of reality is stamped on these Sonnets with unmistakable clearness."[6] Mr. Lee, while regarding some of these as mere fanci

rcises in poetizing. They have no connection with the others, and I would have no contention with those who regard them as suggested by Petrarch, or as complaisant imitations of the vogu

n different orders, without seriously affecting the whole. To that extent they are disconnected. But in whatever order those groups are placed, through them runs the same theme-the relations of the poet to his friend or patr

ently of the remainder of that poem. And there are none of the Sonnets, however they may read standing alone, that do not fit the mode and movement of those with which they stand c

eaning and should reject any construction which would make any of their description or movement incongruous to any other part. Of course we shall expect to find in them the enlargement or exaggeration of poetic license. But so doing we must recall the characteristics of their great author, who with all e

tno

itical Study. Temple edition of Shakesp

glish Literatu

eare, p. 27. The Sonnet i

peare: His Mind an

rature of Europe,

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f Shakespeare, p