ep again; and then, in dreaming,
The clouds, methought, would open and shew riches
Ready to drop on me: that when I wak'd
I cried to dream again.

which is very lovely; but the Dark Lady may have had that vice in her
ears which Cloten dreaded: she may not have seen the beauty of it,
whereas there can be no doubt at all that of "My mistress' eyes are
nothing like the sun," &c., not a word was lost on her.

And is it to be supposed that Shakespear was too stupid or too modest
not to see at last that it was a case of Jupiter and Semele?
Shakespear was most certainly not modest in that sense. The timid
cough of the minor poet was never heard from him.

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme

is only one out of a dozen passages in which he (possibly with a keen
sense of the fun of scandalizing the modest coughers) proclaimed his
place and his power in "the wide world dreaming of things to come."
The Dark Lady most likely thought this side of him insufferably
conceited; for there is no reason to suppose that she liked his plays
any better than Minna Wagner liked Richard's music dramas: as likely
as not, she thought The Spanish Tragedy worth six Hamlets. He was not
stupid either: if his class limitations and a profession that cut him
off from actual participation in great affairs of State had not
confined his opportunities of intellectual and political training to
private conversation and to the Mermaid Tavern, he would probably have
become one of the ablest men of his time instead of being merely its
ablest playwright. One might surmise that Shakespear found out that
the Dark Lady's brains could no more keep pace with his than Anne
Hathaway's, if there were any evidence that their friendship ceased
when he stopped writing sonnets to her. As a matter of fact the
consolidation of a passion into an enduring intimacy generally puts an
end to sonnets.

That the Dark Lady broke Shakespear's heart, as Mr Harris will have it
she did, is an extremely unShakespearian hypothesis. "Men have died
from time to time, and worms have eaten them; but not for love," says
Rosalind. Richard of Gloster, into whom Shakespear put all his own
impish superiority to vulgar sentiment, exclaims

And this word "love," which greybeards call divine,
Be resident in men like one another
And not in me: I am myself alone.

Hamlet has not a tear for Ophelia: