Shakespeare's Sonnets [pp. 248-259]

Shakspere's Sonnets.
At this point we will leave the sonnets to
his mistress, and turn back to the first series,
where we find a kindred group begins at
XXIIi. Shakspere has sustained a wrong
at the hands of his friend.
Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams wvith heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride,
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace
Even so my sun one early morn did shine
With all-triumphant splendour on my brow;
But out, alack! he was but one hour mine,
The region cloud hath mask'd him from me now.
Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth
Suns of the world may stain when heaven's sun
staineth. xxxiii.
His friend offers some apology, which
Shakspere says "heals the wound but cures
not the disgrace."
'Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day,
Andt make me travel forth without my cloak,
To let base clouds o'ertake me in my way,
Hiding thy bravery in their rotten smoke?
'T is not enough that through the cloud thou break,
To dry the rain on my storm-beaten face,
For no man well of such a salve can speak,
That heals the wound, and cures not the disgrace;
Nor can thy shame give physic to my grief;
Though thou repent, yet I have still the loss
The offender's sorrow lends but weak relief
To him that bears the strong ofifence's cross,
Ah! but those tears are pearl which thy love sheds,
And they are rich, and ransom all ill deeds.
XXXIV.
Still it is better we should be separated,
said Shakspere in sonnet xxxvI. I cannot
help loving you, but the disgrace is such and
so publicly known that it is better you should
not honor me with any marks of your good
will,- we must separate. Sonnet XL. confesses the cause of the breach between the
friends: the dark woman had tempted Will,
who had fallen a victim to her charms. It
was a double treachery and a double bereavement.
I do forgive thy robbery, gentle thief,
Although thou steal thee all my poverty;
And yet, love knows, it is a greater grief
To bear love's wrong than hate's known injury.
XL.
The dark woman now disappears from the
sonnets, and I believe she ceased to cast her
baleful spell over Shakspere's life. There
has been much speculation as to who the
woman was that could so entrance this
prince of poets, but there is no clue to her
identity. Perhaps the black-eyed Rosaline
of' Love's Labor's Lost" is an early likeness
of her, and possibly the faithless Cleopatra,
"that serpent of old Nile.. with Phcebus's
amorous pinches black," is a later sketch
from memory. If so, we have her portrait
without her name. In all the witchery she
cast over him Shakspere knew she was false
to him as well as false to her duty, and when
in excuse for her shortcomings she reminded
him of his lapses from duty, he answered:
O0, but with mine compare thou thine own state,
And thou shalt find it merits not reproving;
Or, if it do, not from those lips of thine,
That have profan'd their scarlet ornaments
And seal'd false bonds of love as oft as mine.
CXLII.
In leaving this chapter of the sonnets let
us not pass harsh judgment upon Shakspere's
lapse from duty, but remember that the times
were wild, the morals of England were loose
and ungoverned, his fellows in his profession
with whom he was necessarily on terms of intimacy were generally profligate in morals and
dissipated in habits, and he himself in the
very flush of early manhood. The calm deep
wisdom of later years was not yet his; as
Dowden says, he could understand Romeo,
but he could not have conceived of Prospero.
Still it is characteristic of the manliness and
honesty of his soul that he never fooled himself with justifying his sin. He deplores the
"mad fever" which his mistress's eyes kindled in his blood, but he never defends his
own conduct. And if I read aright some of
the later sonnets, he outlived this madness
and looked back on the spells the siren had
cast over him, with a shudder of aversion.
Losing sight of the dark woman we turn
again to the story of his relations to his young
friend. With XLIII. begins another group.
Shakspere is away on a journey and much
depressed. In XLVI. he has received Will's
picture, which gives him great comfort in his
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