s have not the slightest weight with Mr. Massey, and
words are too weak to express his scorn of this theory and its
supporters. Mr. Brown wraps things in a winding sheet of witless words
(delicious alliteration!); he leaves the subject dark and dubious as
ever; his theory has only served to trouble deep waters, and make them
so muddy that it is impossible to see to the bottom; in short, Mr. Brown
and his fellow thinkers, in the opinion of Mr. Massey, are
arch-deceivers and audacious misinterpreters, and have no more idea of
what Shakespeare meant than they have of telling the truth about it. Why
Mr. Massey should have worked himself into a passion before he
began to write is a mystery darker than any he attempts to solve, but
the intemperate, bitter and self-conceited tone of the whole book is
alone an immense injury to its critical value.

In constructing his elaborate theory of the Sonnets, Mr. Massey has
committed many grave offences against the rules of criticism. He has
gone to his work with the strongest possible prejudices; he has begun it
with certain preconceived ideas of what Shakespeare meant to write; he
has found it necessary to destroy entirely the order of the poems, and
to rearrange them, even sometimes to alter the text, to fit his own
notions; and he has carried his investigations into such puerile and
minute twistings of the text as can only be paralleled by Mr. Page's
quotation in support of his scar. For instance, in Sonnet 78 occur these
lines:

Thine eyes that taught the dumb on high to sing
And heavy ignorance aloft to fly,
Have added feathers to the learned's wing
And given grace a double majesty.

Mr. Massey thinks that in this quatrain (which the vulgar mind would
accept as it stands, nor expect to treat as other than figurative)
Shakespeare was passing in review the writers under the patronage of the
earl of Southampton, to whom the sonnet is addressed, and that he can
identify the four personifications! Shakespeare of course is the Dumb
taught to sing by the favor of the earl; resolute John Florio, the
translator of Montaigne, is Heavy Ignorance; Tom Nash is the Learned,
who has had feathers added to his wing; and Marlowe is the Grace to whom
is given a double majesty! Marlowe's chief characteristic was majesty,
says Mr. Massey; therefore, we suppose, he is spoken of as _grace_. The
rest of his "exquisite reasons" may be found at pages 134-143 of the
book.

This is