than the literary value of
these poems, is their value as a revelation of Shakespeare's own life.
If we could take in earnest everything which is said in the sonnets, we
should learn a great many facts about the man who wrote them. But
modern scholarship seems to feel more and more that we cannot take all
their statements literally. We must remember here again that
Shakespeare says many things because it was the fashion in his day for
sonnetteers to say them. For example, he gives some eloquent
descriptions of the woes of old age; but we know that contemporary
poets lamented about old age when they had not yet reached years of
discretion; and consequently we are not at all convinced that
Shakespeare was either really old or prematurely aged. Such
considerations need not interfere with our enjoyment of the poetry, for
the author's imagination may have made a poetical fancy seem real to
him as he wrote; but they certainly do not lessen our doubts in regard
to the value of the sonnets as autobiography. The majority of the
sonnets, at least, cannot be said to throw any light on Shakespeare's
life.

There are, however, six sonnets, connected with each other in subject,
which, more definitely than any of {69} the others, shadow forth a real
event in the poet's life. These are numbers XL, XLI, XLII, CXXXIII,
CXXXIV, CXLIV. They seem to show that a woman whom the poet loved had
forsaken him for the man to whom the sonnets are written; and that the
poet submits to this, owing to his deep friendship for the man. Two of
these sonnets are given below.

SONNET CXLIV

"Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still:
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman colour'd ill.
To win me soon to hell, my female evil
Tempteth my better angel from my side,
And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,
Wooing his purity with her foul pride.
And whether that my angel be turn'd fiend
Suspect I may, yet not directly tell:
But being both from me, both to each friend,
I guess one angel in another's hell:
Yet this shall I ne'er know, but live in doubt,
Till my bad angel fire my good one out."

SONNET XLI

"These pretty wrongs that liberty commits,
When I am sometime absent from thy heart,
Thy beauty and thy years full well befits,
For still temptation follows where thou art.
Gentle thou art, and therefore to be won,