ve loves not to have years told_:
Therefore I lie with her and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flatter'd be.

The poet is here speaking of his mistress, the mistress of his carnal
love, who had in act her bed-vow broke (Sonnet CLII.). Having stated
that when she swears she is true he knows she lies, he adopts the
conceit of asserting that he is not old, as an equivalent to her
obvious falsehood in saying that she is not unjust. This is one of
twenty-six Sonnets relating to his mistress and her desertion of him
for his friend. In Sonnets XL., XLI., and XLII. he complains to his
friend of the same wrong.

The fact that the poet found a subject for his verse in such an
occurrence has been much commented on. Poetic fancy would hardly have
chosen such a theme, and these Sonnets seem to be certainly based on
an actual occurrence. And if so, certainly we may construe them very
literally; and read literally they certainly appear to be an old man's
lament at having been superseded by a younger though much loved rival.

William Shakespeare was a prosperous, a very successful man. In twenty
years he accumulated property which made him a rich man,--yielding a
yearly income of $5000, equivalent to $25,000 dollars at the present
time. He was an actor publicly accredited as a man of amorous
gallantries[16]; he married at eighteen, apparently in haste, and less
than six months before the birth of a child.[17] We know from legal
records that he and his father before him had frequent lawsuits.[18]
While a uniform tradition represents him as comely, pleasing and
attractive, equally does it represent him as a man of ready,
aggressive and caustic wit, and rebellious and bitter against
opposition.[19] The lines on the slab over his grave are less
supplicatory than mandatory against the removal of his bones to the
adjacent charnel-house.[20] His name, often written with a hyphen,
indicates that he came of English fighting stock. When the Sonnets
were written he was in the full tide of success. It is not credible
that such a man at thirty or thirty-five, of buoyant and abounding
life, could have so bewailed the loss of a mistress.

Mr. Lee says that the Sonnets last quoted admit of no literal
interpretation.[21] In other words, as I understand, he concedes that
a literal interpretation is destructive of what he assumes to be the
fact as to the authorship of the Shakespearean plays. By what right or
rule of construction