[38] The indications
that he had little love for his wife are regrettably clear.[39] When the
earlier Sonnets were written he must have been living there about nine
years, and must have had an income sufficient easily to have maintained
his family in the city.[40] That he led a life notoriously free as to women
cannot be questioned. Traditions elsewhere referred to so indicate[41]; and
whether the Sonnets were written by or to him they equally so testify.
Under such circumstances his friends or acquaintances would not be
led to presume that he was married, but would assume the contrary.
They would have done or considered precisely as we do, classing our
friends as married or unmarried, as their mode of life indicates.
Hence the invocation to marry is entirely consistent with the theory
that the Sonnets were addressed to Shakespeare. When Sonnet CIV. was
written, the poet had known his friend but three years[42]; the
Sonnets referring to marriage are printed first, and very probably
were written much earlier than Sonnet CIV., and perhaps when their
acquaintance was first formed. The fact that the appeal ceases with
the seventeenth Sonnet, and that after that there is not even a hint
of marrying, or of female excellence and beauty, perhaps indicates
that the first seventeen Sonnets had provoked a disclosure which
restrained the poet from further reference to those subjects.

* * * * *

The starting point in this chapter is the fact stated by Mr. Lee, and
I think conceded or assumed by all writers on these Sonnets,--that
they were written to some one intimately connected with the
Shakespearean plays, either as a patron or in some other manner. Many,
perhaps all, of the plays were produced, and in that way published, at
the theatre where Shakespeare acted. Those of the higher class or
order as well as those of the lower class were published as his. Those
most strenuous in supporting the claims of authorship for Shakespeare,
have, I think, generally conceded that the plays, as we now have them,
reveal in various parts the work of more than one author. And from
that it has been suggested that Shakespeare must have had a
fellow-worker,--a collaborator. Lee's _Shakespeare_, Brandes's
_Critical Study of Shakespeare_, and the Temple edition of
Shakespeare's works, are practically agreed on this fact in relation
to _Henry VI._, _Henry VIII._, _Titus Andronicus_, and some other
plays. There must have b