tion and its treatment
seem only capable of explanation by regarding the topic as a reflection
of Shakespeare's personal experience. But how far he is sincere in his
accounts of his sorrow in yielding his mistress to his friend in order to
retain the friendship of the latter must be decided by each reader for
himself. If all the words be taken literally, there is disclosed an act
of self-sacrifice that it is difficult to parallel or explain. But it
remains very doubtful if the affair does not rightly belong to the annals
of gallantry. The sonnetteer's complacent condonation of the young man's
offence chiefly suggests the deference that was essential to the
maintenance by a dependent of peaceful relations with a self-willed and
self-indulgent patron. Southampton's sportive and lascivious temperament
might easily impel him to divert to himself the attention of an
attractive woman by whom he saw that his poet was fascinated, and he was
unlikely to tolerate any outspoken protest on the part of his _protege_.
There is no clue to the lady's identity, and speculation on the topic is
useless. She may have given Shakespeare hints for his pictures of the
'dark lady,' but he treats that lady's obduracy conventionally, and his
vituperation of her sheds no light on the personal history of the
mistress who left him for his friend.

'Willobie his Avisa.'

The emotions roused in Shakespeare by the episode, even if potent at the
moment, were not likely to be deep-seated or enduring. And it is
possible that a half-jesting reference, which would deprive Shakespeare's
amorous adventure of serious import, was made to it by a literary comrade
in a poem that was licensed for publication on September 3, 1594, and was
published immediately under the title of 'Willobie his Avisa, or the True
Picture of a Modest Maid and of a Chaste and Constant Wife.' {155} In
this volume, which mainly consists of seventy-two cantos in varying
numbers of six-line stanzas, the chaste heroine, Avisa, holds
converse--in the opening section as a maid, and in the later section as a
wife--with a series of passionate adorers. In every case she firmly
repulses their advances. Midway through the book its alleged
author--Henry Willobie--is introduced in his own person as an ardent
admirer, and the last twenty-nine of the cantos rehearse his woes and
Avisa's obduracy. To this section there is prefixed an argument in prose
(canto xliv.) It is there stated