Page:Poet Lore, volume 3, 1891.djvu/522

506 deniers of a literal interpretation have shown a great deal of ingenuity in their attempts to account for all the difficulties involved in their thesis, but not one of them, in my opinion, at least, has succeeded in giving anything like a rational solution. Among the most reasonable of the objectors is Dyce, who states his conviction that most of the Sonnets were composed in an assumed character, on different subjects and at different times, for the amusement, if not at the suggestion, of the author's intimate associates, and though he does not positively deny that one or two of the Sonnets may reflect his genuine feelings, yet he holds that the allusions scattered through the whole series are not to be hastily referred to the personal circumstances of Shakespeare.

Delius contends that the Sonnets were a tribute to the poetic fashion of the times, when almost everybody wrote love-poems, that they were the free outcome of a poetic fancy, and that most of them are to be regarded as offsets from other poetical works of our dramatist. The earlier Sonnets have much in common with "Venus and Adonis," the love for a dark woman of the later series has a strong resemblance to and parallel in Berowne's passion for the dark Rosaline of "Love's Labour's Lost," the mistress resigned to a friend may be a rehandling of the subject of "The Two Gentlemen of Verona." There is much plausibility in this view; the great objection to it is, that the Sonnets form one whole and have nothing of the look of a collection of fragments; they evidently treat of the same persons and have one strain of feeling running through them all, circumstances very difficult to be accounted for if we regard these poems as offsets from other works. Minto follows Delius in looking on them as exercises of skill, "undertaken," as he says, "in a spirit of wanton defiance and derision of commonplace." He has evidently been led to this conclusion by the difficulty of supposing Shakespeare to have been enamoured of a woman devoid of personal attractions, as the dark lady of the Sonnets seems to have been.

Henry Brown, who wrote a work on the subject in 1870, considers the Sonnets as having been "written with a satirical motive, to bring into ridicule mistress Sonneting." This would have obviously given offence to the sonneteers of the time, and in support of his