to suggest the doubt as to
the authorship of the Shakespearean plays. His suggestion was that
their real author was "some pale, wasted student ... with eyes of
genius gleaming through despair" who found in Shakespeare a purchaser,
a publisher, a friend, and a patron. If that theory is correct, the
man that penned those Sonnets sleeps, as he said he would, in an
unrecorded grave, while his publisher, friend and patron, precisely as
he also said, has a place in the Pantheon of the immortals.

Very many of these Sonnets seem to be evolved from, or kindred to, the
thought so sharply presented in Sonnets LV. and LXXXI. I would refer
the reader particularly to Sonnets XXXVIII., XLIX., LXXI., LXXII, and
LXXXVIII. The last two lines of Sonnet LXXI. are as follows:

Lest the _wise_ world should look into your moan,
And mock you with me after I am gone.

The first lines of Sonnet LXXII. are as follows:

O! lest the world should task you to recite
What merit lived in me, that you should love
After my death, dear love, forget me quite,
For you in me can nothing worthy prove;
Unless you would devise some virtuous lie,
To do more for me than mine own desert,
And hang more praise upon deceased I
Than _niggard_ truth would _willingly_ impart:

Many of these Sonnets, which otherwise seem entirely inexplicable, and
which have for that reason been held to be imitations or strange and
unnatural conceits, become true and genuine and much more poetic, if
we conceive them to be written, not by the accredited author of the
Shakespearean dramas, but by the unnamed and unknown student whose
connection with them was carefully concealed. I suggest that the
reader test this statement by carefully reading the four Sonnets last
mentioned.

The claim for a literal reading of Sonnet LXXXI. is greatly
strengthened by its context, by reading it with the group of Sonnets
of which it forms a part. Sonnets LXXVII. to XC. all more or less
relate to another poet, who, the author fears, has supplanted him in
the affection, or it may be, in the patronage of his friend. That
particularly appears in Sonnet LXXXVI.:

Was it the proud full sail of his great verse,
Bound for the prize of all too precious you,
That did my ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse,
Making their tomb the womb wherein they grew?
Was it _his_ spirit, by spirits taught to write
Above a mortal pitch, that struck me dead?
No, neither he, nor h