ven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

Take this as a sample of the sort of compliment from which she was
never for a moment safe with Shakespear. Bear in mind that she was
not a comedian; that the Elizabethan fashion of treating brunettes as
ugly woman must have made her rather sore on the subject of her
complexion; that no human being, male or female, can conceivably enjoy
being chaffed on that point in the fourth couplet about the perfumes;
that Shakespear's revulsions, as the sonnet immediately preceding
shews, were as violent as his ardors, and were expressed with the
realistic power and horror that makes Hamlet say that the heavens got
sick when they saw the queen's conduct; and then ask Mr Harris whether
any woman could have stood it for long, or have thought the "sugred"
compliment worth the cruel wounds, the cleaving of the heart in twain,
that seemed to Shakespear as natural and amusing a reaction as the
burlesquing of his heroics by Pistol, his sermons by Falstaff, and his
poems by Cloten and Touchstone.

Jupiter and Semele

This does not mean that Shakespear was cruel: evidently he was not;
but it was not cruelty that made Jupiter reduce Semele to ashes: it
was the fact that he could not help being a god nor she help being a
mortal. The one thing Shakespear's passion for the Dark Lady was not,
was what Mr Harris in one passage calls it: idolatrous. If it had
been, she might have been able to stand it. The man who "dotes yet
doubts, suspects, yet strongly loves," is tolerable even by a spoilt
and tyrannical mistress; but what woman could possibly endure a man
who dotes without doubting; who _knows_, and who is hugely amused at
the absurdity of his infatuation for a woman of whose mortal
imperfections not one escapes him: a man always exchanging grins with
Yorick's skull, and inviting "my lady" to laugh at the sepulchral
humor of the fact that though she paint an inch thick (which the Dark
Lady may have done), to Yorick's favor she must come at last. To the
Dark Lady he must sometimes have seemed cruel beyond description: an
intellectual Caliban. True, a Caliban who could say

Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises
Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices,
That, if I then had waked after long sleep
Will make me sle