25, 42.

[39] Lee's _Shakespeare_, pp. 22-26, 273, 274.

[40] Halliwell's _Shakespeare_, p. 172, Lee's _Shakespeare_, pp.
193-196.

[41] See pp. 68-70, _supra_.

[42] The portion of Sonnet CIV. relevant to this point is printed at
page 26, _supra_.

[43] These plays contain names of places and persons, and allusions
and references, which could hardly have been made had Shakespeare been
a stranger to their composition. In _As You Like It_, the forest has
his mother's family name, "Arden"; the allusion to Sir Thomas Lucy,
has already been noticed. Page 63, _supra_.

[44] While I speak of the poet of the Sonnets and of the greater plays
as unknown, I can but believe that the Sonnets, when carefully studied
in connection with contemporaneous history and chronicles, will yet
afford an adequate clew to his identification. It occurs to me that a
promising line of inquiry might be made on this assumption,--that the
poet was born about twenty years before Shakespeare and died soon
after the production of the plays ceased, or when about sixty-five or
seventy years of age; that he had reverses and disappointments,
perhaps humiliations; that his name was William, and that he had
written other works before he wrote the Shakespearean plays. It is
also possible, although I think not probable, that the initials, W.
H., appearing in the introduction to these Sonnets may refer to him.
That he had produced earlier works, I think is shown by Sonnet LXXVI.
The first lines of that Sonnet are as follows:

"Why is my verse so barren of new pride,
So far from variation of quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods and to compounds strange?
_Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep inventions in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name_,
Showing their birth and where they did proceed?"

CHAPTER VI

OF THE CONCLUSIONS TO BE DRAWN FROM THE SONNETS

The result of the preceding discussion, as it appears to me, is as
follows:

The Sonnets were not written by Shakespeare, but it is very probable
that he was the friend or patron around whom their poetry moves and to
whom most of them are addressed.

Reading the entire series with that theory in mind, very many
difficulties of interpretation are entirely overcome. Without this
theory so many of the Sonnets seem blind, or obviously false or
inaccurate, that many have been led to the inference of conceits,