English and German. It is sorrowful to consider of how small worth the contribution I make to the knowledge of these poems is, in proportion to the time and pains bestowed.

To render Shakspere's meaning clear has been my aim. I do not make his poetry an occasion for giving lessons in etymology. It would have been easy, and not useless, to have enlarged the notes with parallels from other Elizabethan writers; but they are already bulky. I have been sparing of such parallel passages, and have illustrated Shakspere chiefly from his own writings. Repeated perusals have convinced me. that the Sonnets stand in the right order, and that sonnet is connected with sonnet in more instances than have been observed. My notes on each sonnet commonly begin with an attempt to point out the little links or articulations in thought and word which connect it with its predecessor or the group to which it belongs. I frankly warn the reader that I have pushed this kind of criticism far, perhaps too far. I have perhaps in some instances fancied points of connection which have no real existence; some I have set down which seem to myself conjectural. After this warning, I ask the friendly reader not to grow too soon impatient; and if, going through the text carefully, he will consider for himself the points which I have noted, I have a hope that he will in many instances see reason to agree with what I have said.

The text here presented is that of a conservative editor, opposed to conjecture, unless conjecture be a necessity, and desirous to abide by the Quarto (1609), unless strong reasons appear for a departure from it.

1

Sonnets by Shakspere are first mentioned in Meres's Palladis Tamia, 1598: "The sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous and hony-tongued Shakespeare, witnes his sugred Sonnets among his private friends." In the following year, 1599, Sonnets CXXXVIII. and CXLIV. were printed in the bookseller Jaggard's surreptitious miscellany, The Passionate Pilgrim (see Notes on these Sonnets). Both of these refer to a woman beloved by the writer: the second is that remarkable poem beginning

Two loves I have of comfort and despair.

For ten years we hear no more of the Sonnets. On May 20, 1609, A book called Shakespeares Sonnettes was entered on the Stationers' Register by Thomas Thorpe, and in the same year the Quarto edition appeared: "Shake-speares Sonnets. Never before Imprinted. At London by G. Eld for T. T. [Thomas Thorpe] and to be solde by William Apsley. 1609." 1 Edward Alleyn notes in that year that he bought a copy for fivepence. The Sonnets had not the popularity of Shakspere's other poems. No second edition was published until 1640 (printed 1639), when they formed part of "Poems: written by Wil. Shake-speare, Gent," a volume containing many pieces not by Shakspere. Here the Sonnets are printed with small regard to their order in the edition of 1609, in groups, with the poems of The Passionate Pilgrim interspersed, each group bearing a fanciful title. The bookseller Benson introduced the Poems with an address to The Reader, in which he

1 Some copies instead of "William Apsley" have "John Wright, dwelling at Christ Churchgate."

asserts that they are "of the same purity the Authour then living avouched," and that the reader will find them "seren, clear, and elegantly plain." The titles given to the groups carry the suggestion that the Sonnets, with few exceptions, were addressed by a lover to his lady.

This edition of 1640 was reprinted several times in the eighteenth century; the text of the quarto 1609, by Lintott 1711, in Steevens's Twenty Plays, 1766, and by Malone. Gildon and Sewell, editors of the first half of the century, having the 1640 text before them, assumed that the Sonnets were addressed to Shakspere's mistress. It remained for the editors and critics of the second half of the century to discover that the greater number were written for a young man. To a careful reader of the original it needed small research to ascertain that a friend is addressed in the first hundred and twenty-five sonnets, to which the poem in twelve lines, numbered CXXVI., is an Envoy; while the Sonnets CXXVII.-CLIV. either address a mistress, or have reference to her and to the poet's passion for her.

The student of Shakspere is drawn to the Sonnets not alone by their ardour and depth of feeling, their fertility and condensation of thought, their exquisite felicities of phrase, and their frequent beauty of rhythmical movement, but in a peculiar degree by the possibility that here, if nowhere else, the greatest of English poets may -as Wordsworth puts it-have "unlocked his heart."1 1 Poets differ in the interpretation of the Sonnets as widely as critics. "With this same key

Shakespeare unlocked his heart' once more!

Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!"

It were strange if his silence, deep as that of the secrets of Nature, never once knew interruption. The moment, however, we regard the Sonnets as autobiographical, we find ourselves in the presence of doubts and difficulties, exaggerated, it is true, by many writers, yet certainly real.

If we must escape from them, the simplest mode is to assume that the Sonnets are "the free outcome of a poetic imagination" (Delius). It is an ingenious suggestion of Delius that certain groups may be offsets from other poetical works of Shakspere. Those urging a beautiful youth to perpetuate his beauty in offspring may be a derivative from Venus and Adonis; those declaring love for a dark-complexioned woman may rehandle the theme set forth in Berowne's passion for the dark Rosaline of Love's Labour's Lost; those which tell of a mistress resigned to a friend may be a nondramatic treatment of the theme of love and friendship So, Mr. Browning; to whom replies Mr. Swinburne, "No whit the less like Shakespeare, but undoubtedly the less like Browning." Some of Shelley's feeling with reference to the Sonnets may be guessed from certain lines to be found among the Studies for Epipsychidion and Cancelled Passages (Poetical Works: ed. Forman, vol. ii. pp. 392, 393), to which my attention has been called by Mr. E. W. Gosse :

"If any should be curious to discover

Whether to you I am a friend or lover,

Let them read Shakspeare's sonnets, taking thence

A whetstone for their dull intelligence

That tears and will not cut, or let them guess

How Diotima, the wise prophetess,

Instructed the instructor, and why he
Rebuked the infant spirit of melody

On Agathon's sweet lips, which as he spoke
Was as the lovely star when morn has broke
The roof of darkness, in the golden dawn,
Half-hidden and yet beautiful."

presented in the later scenes of The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Perhaps a few sonnets, as CX., CXI., refer to circumstances of Shakspere's life (Dyce). The main body of these poems may still be regarded as mere exercises of the fancy.

Such an explanation of the Sonnets has the merit of simplicity; it unties no knots but cuts all at a blow. If the collection consists of disconnected exercises of the fancy, we need not try to reconcile discrepancies, nor shape a story, nor ascertain a chronology, nor identify persons. And what indeed was a sonneteer's passion but a painted fire? What was the form of verse but an exotic curiously trained and tended, in which an artificial sentiment imported from Italy gave perfume and colour to the flower?

And yet, in this as in other forms, the poetry of the time, which possesses an enduring vitality, was not commonly caught out of the air, but-however large the conventional element in it may have been-was born of the union of heart and imagination: in it real feelings and real experience, submitting to the poetical fashions of the day, were raised to an ideal expression. Spenser wooed and wedded the Elizabeth of his Amoretti. The Astrophel and Stella tells of a veritable tragedy, fatal perhaps to two bright lives and passionate hearts. And what poems of Drummond do we remember as we remember those which record how he loved and lamented Mary Cunningham ?

Some students of the Sonnets, who refuse to trace their origin to real incidents of Shakspere's life, allow that they form a connected poem, or at most two connected poems;