HATEVER the date of its first appearance, it is very evident that when the idea that the Shakespeare sonnets were

expressions of hidden and cipher meanings, of unique or interwritten philosophy, mystic or erotic relations between personages contemporary with their composition (were anything, in fact, but some one hundred and fifty-four desultory rhymes in sonnet form), came into English literature, it came to stay. For, often as it has been dismissed and discarded, it is still to the fore; and even now, within this current year of enlightenment, when most other mundane things not responding to the touchstone of nineteenthcentury scrutiny have been discarded as rubbish, when even on the stage and in decorative art the romantic, rococo, and purposeless have disappeared even here are one stout volume and two

ponderous essays in as many phlegmatic reviews, which thresh the old floors once more, re-read once more the alleged cryptogram of these everlasting sonnets, and construe it a different way each time.

In following these hermetic essays ordinary criticism is impressed not so much with their ingenuity (for there is no limit to human ingenuity) as with the facility with which not only Shakespeare's sonnets, but any other literary matter. not historical, scientific, or didactic, may be so hermetically and allegorically treated. After all, what poem or prose romance exists which cannot be tortured into a set of symbolic types or allegories? Up to date there has not been lavished upon these sonnets anything like the literature, for example, once so popular with what we Americans call "cranks," devoted to that most ominous co-significance between the names Apollyon and Napoleon and the consequent danger to this planet of ours, of which almost any old book-shop will be sure to yield plentiful treatises. The last Napoleon, however, has passed out of sight without leaving so much as a sulphurous aroma in the ether, and it is just among the possibilities that even these tremendous sonnets are not hermetic, allegorical, or even-to what base uses may we come!-biographical at all! The really surprising thing, when one comes to think of it, in Mr. Gerald Massey's immense octavo,1 is

"Shakespeare's Sonnets, never before Interpreted: The Secret Drama of Shakespeare's Sonnets unfolded, with the Characters identified." By Gerald Massey. London: Long

that he, a poet himself, should have insisted on referring these Shakespeare sonnets to an identified love-affair of the Elizabethan day, when an ideal love-affair would have answered just as well. If Mr. Massey had not been a poet before he became a Shakespearean commentator, we should have perhaps wondered why he selected Southampton as the lover instead of Pembroke (for whose name, by grace of baptism and good nature, "W. H." might perhaps have stood). But, being a poet, why should not any one man -for love-affairs are, after all, pretty much alike, and involve a good many secondary rivalries and friendships have done as well as any other, or why should we not consider the sonnets as representing the uneven and tortuous course of any ordinary love-affair, when, to a poet, ideals are so much nearer and nicer than actual happenings?

Supposing that it should only be granted for argument's sake that these one hundred and fiftyfour sonnets are just one hundred and fifty-four anonymous poems of the Elizabethan era—a catena (to borrow George Eliot's irreverence anent the "Faerie Queene") in which "you see no reason why it should not go on forever, and you accept that conclusion as an arrangement of Providence rather than of the author,"- granted that, what would be first to strike a critical eye? We think it would be- could hardly fail to bethe extreme inequality of the sonnets themselves.

I. Could anything be more marked, more apparent, than this inequality? Here, for example, against the tenderness and pathos of Sonnets xxx. and cvi., in which scarcely a quaint or archaic

phrase marks them of their century, we must offset Sonnet lxxxvii., in whose every line occurs an old term of court or musty chancery catchword, making it altogether about as signal an adaptation of old saws and modern instances to complimentary purposes as one can find in the Law Burlesques :

"Whereas, in sundry boughs and sprays
Now divers birds allege to sing,

And certain flowers their heads upraise,
Hail, as aforesaid, coming spring!"

Is this burlesque any worse than—

"Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing,
And like enough thou know'st thy estimate:
The charter of thy worth gives thee releasing;
My bonds in thee are all determinate"?

Or, still more extreme example of this law-letter pedantry, the cxxxiv.:

"And I myself am mortgaged to thy will,
Myself I'll forfeit, so that other mine
Thou wilt restore to be my comfort still.

.

He learned but surety-like to write for me
Under that bond that him as fast doth bind.
The statute of thy beauty thou wilt take."

And so on, with "patent," "misprision," "judg ment," and the like, employed as a lover's symbols to his mistress. Mr. Casaubon might have written something in this strain had he been a chancery practitioner and attempted a sonnet to Dorothea; or old Tulkinghorn, or Mr. Vholes. But is it not rather hard to imagine merry Will Shakespeare scribbling this sort of thing on the

banks of Avon, among the primroses of sunny Stratford, and with the bibulant temptations of Bidford, Pebworth and Marston within easy hailing distance?

Then, again, we have the "though rotten, not forgotten" of the lxxxi. Sonnets cxxxv. and cxxxvi. are plays upon the word "Will,” the name recurring once or twice in about every line of them. This is another mood. Whether the name refers to "Will Shakespeare," or to "W. H.," or to a "willy" (which is said to have been the slang for "poet" in those days) is what nobody can find out. But how it has, in any case, anything to do with Lord Southampton's particular love-affairs only Mr. Massey knows.

Is it not a fact to go without cavil that the sonnet form in which most of these are written (for cxlv. appears to be the only one not in that form) is the principal reason for binding them up together? Has any other reason been discovered, or any other relation between them not purely visionary and fanciful? Most of us have smiled, we suppose, to fancy what Shakespeare would say could he rise from his seventeen-foot grave (it was too deep for a well, even if not wide enough for a church-door) and encounter some of the "readings" which have been assigned to him during these last one hundred and fifty years. And as to the rage to find in earlier or contemporary literature the sources whence Shakespeare procured this or that or the other phrase, some hint, perhaps, of William Shakespeare's own treatment of that feature of commentary, could he only come back again, may be gathered from a