Page:Shakespeare's Sonnets (1923) Yale.djvu/104

94 reader by their resemblances to Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594), and by their fluency, their enthusiasm for beauty, their excess of emotion over reflection is that as a whole they are the work of the young Shakespeare. They may be assigned roughly to the years 1593–1598, which would bring them within the period of the greatest vogue of the Elizabethan sonnet. This assumption does not preclude the possibility that some of the sonnets were written much later, even in the reign of James I. Here is one more unsolved problem.

The order of the sonnets is a fascinating study. It has sometimes been assumed that sonnets Nos. 1–125 are all written to or about a lovely youth. It is certain that No. 126, the lyric in couplets, marks a division in the series and that most of the sonnets placed after it concern themselves directly or indirectly with the dark woman; but it does not follow as a corollary that all the sonnets before No. 126 refer to a man. There is no reason to assume that the original publisher, Thorpe, was close enough to Shakespeare to understand fully the different MSS. out of which he may have combined the whole series. It is easy to see that many of the sonnets are printed in their proper sequence (Nos. 1–17, 40–42, 63–65, 78–86, for example), but on the other hand some sonnets are clearly out of their natural order (cf. Nos. 70, 77, 81). It is not at all certain that all of the sonnets before No. 126 must refer to the youth Shakespeare praised, though Thorpe may have thought so or wished the reader to think so. Benson, the publisher of the second edition, would have the reader believe, from the titles affixed to the sonnets in his edition, that nearly all these poems were written to a woman. In five cases when the text of the first edition showed that to be impossible, he altered it, changing 'him' to 'her' and 'friend' or 'boy' to 'love.' (Nos. 101, 104, 108.)