CHAPTER XXI.

THE SONNETS DO NOT LEAD TO THE TRUE SHAKESPEARE.

"I had rather than forty shillings I had my book of songs and sonnets here."

-Merry Wives of Windsor, i, 1.

As I desire to take the reader with me in the search for the real Shakespeare, I have blazed for him one path which may lead to the true goal. I call it the pathway of the poems. The Venus and Adonis and the Tarquin and Lucrece constitute that pathway, and the dedications with the argument annexed to Tarquin and Lucrece form an auxiliary path.

When I began my explorations in that path, I started with an investigation of the Areopagus literary club which was composed of a select few of English scholars, and which, as will be noticed, was very careless as to the preservation of the product of the talent and labors of its members. If that club had made and enforced a rule that all poems and plays of its members should be safely preserved and kept by some authorized custodian for future use, reference, or publication, much, very much would have been gained to English literature, and many of the great poems and plays of its members, which circulated in society after the authors were dead, would have been saved from destruction, and when published, credited to the real authors by the publishers, who in Elizabeth's day were rather piratical.

The Areopagus Club, I quote from Bourne, "was a club started before 1579; composed mainly of courtiers,

who aspired to be also men of letters, apparently with Sir Philip Sidney as its president, to which were admitted other men of letters, among others Spenser in particular, who hardly aspired to rank with the courtiers." It seems to have had Gabriel Harvey as a corresponding member and counselor in chief. Among its exercises we may reckon Sidney's "Lady of May" produced in 1578. Dyer and Greville were evidently busy members. Though very little of his writing survives, Dyer was accounted a great poet in his time, and the tragedies by Greville, which are extant, were, as he tells us, written in his younger days when Sidney was his associate in literary pursuits. Who were the other members of the club we know not, but it started out with the idea of establishing classical forms in English verse writing. Spenser, it seems, composed poems and dramas which are either lost or appropriated by some one under other titles. Among these I will mention The Dying Pelican, a large work finished and ready for the press in 1580, The Dreams, and The Stemmata Dudleiana, as to which he said, "I never did better." It is a fact not generally known that Spenser wrote nine comedies which have never appeared, at least under his name; and yet Harvey, to whom he sent them together with the Fairy Queen for review and criticism, and who was a splendid judge of a good poem or play, declared that these nine comedies were better than the Fairy Queen, a work which the student of English literature well knows ranks by universal consent with the Æneid, the Canterbury Tales, and the Paradise Lost. Harvey wrote to Spenser thus: "To be plain, I am void of all judgment, if your nine comedies come not nearer Ariosto's comedies either for the fineness of plausible execution or the rareness of

poetical invention than the Elvish Queen doth to his Orlando Furioso."

Unable to find the lost comedies or other writings of the members of the Areopagus Club, I turned to the poems. By the poems, I mean the Shake-speare Sonnets, the Venus and Adonis, and the Tarquin and Lucrece.

The diligent reader will wonder why I have left out the Shake-speare Sonnets, so called, from the list of pathways which lead toward the real author or authors of the plays; and therefore it is eminently proper that I should explain clearly why the Sonnets do not so lead, and as I myself started first on that supposed pathway, the consideration of the authorship of the Sonnets will receive immediate attention. I will try to make the reasons for my declaration of the name of the true author as clear and interesting to the studious reader as possible.

In the year 1609, a book appeared in England called "Shake-speare's Sonnets never before imprinted." The word "Shake" and the suffix "speare" were hyphenated, thereby distinguishing the hyphenated words from the surname "Shaksper." Mr. William Shaksper, the reputed author of the plays and poems, was living at that time, and he lived for more than six years thereafter, and he did not, so far as the world knows, either before or after the publication of the Sonnets, claim to be the maker, begetter, furnisher, or author of them or any of them; he did not take them to the publisher; he did not enter the book in the register of the Stationers' Company; he did not spell his name in the hyphenated way, and he did not dedicate the Sonnets to any one.

There was a dedication, however, on a separate leaf, next to the title page, in the following words:

"TO. THE. ONLIE. BEGETTER. OF .
THESE. INSUING. SONNETS .

MR. W. H. ALL. HAPPINESSE.
AND THAT. ETERNITIE.

Although Shaksper never claimed that he wrote the Sonnets, yet on account of the similarity in name, and also for the reason that Francis Meres, in 1598, alluded to Shakespeare's sugared sonnets among his private friends," in his "Palladis Tamia," the weight of public opinion is now on the side of the claimants for Shaksper.

But because of the very natural doubt arising from the apparent illiteracy of Shaksper and from his failure to claim or acknowledge the Sonnets, and because of the further important fact that the statements and references of the sonneteer do not coincide even in the slightest detail with the known and undeniable incidents of Shaksper's life, and because also, as a learned writer well puts it, "while accepting the Meres mention as proof of the authorship of the Sonnets, all commentators, living and dead, reject the Meres list of plays," it has come to pass within the last few years that some learned students of Elizabethan literature have set up the claims of other men to the honor of the authorship of the Sonnets.

This is a step in the right direction, for if William Shaksper of Stratford-on-Avon did not write the Sonnets,

the literary world is interested in knowing who did, if such knowledge is attainable. An examination of the many books written on the subject of the supposed writer of the Sonnets and of the attempted explanations of the meaning set out in them (for the two must go together) discloses the names of the following reputed authors: Sir Walter Raleigh, Francis Bacon, Anthony Shirley, and William Shaksper.

In the year 1838 Armitage Brown wrote a book which contains a very fair dissection of the Sonnets. His arrangement of them is as follows:

Sonnets 1 to 26 inclusive are addressed to the poet's friend, persuading him to marry.

Sonnets 27 to 55 are addressed to the friend, forgiving him for having robbed him of his mistress.

Sonnets 56 to 77 are addressed to the friend, complaining of his coldness and warning him of life's decay.

Sonnets 78 to 101 are addressed to the friend, complaining that he, the friend, prefers another poet's praises and reproving him for faults that may injure his character.

Sonnets 102 to 126 are also addressed to his friend, excusing himself for having been some time silent, and disclaiming the charge of inconstancy.

Sonnets 127 to 152 are addressed to his mistress on the subject of her infidelity.

Coleridge concurs in the foregoing classification of the Sonnets. This division will enable the reader to study them understandingly if he so desires.

In the year 1797 Chalmers endeavored to show that the Sonnets were addressed to Queen Elizabeth. Massey disposes of that conjecture very summarily. "Her majesty," he states, "must have been sixty years of age