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 was, as King James said to her lover, Lord Mountjoy, ‘a fair woman with a black soul.” As for Mary Fitton, we know that she was unmarried in 1601, the time when her amour with Lord Pembroke was discovered, and besides, any theories that connected Lord Pembroke with the Sonnets were, as Cyril Graham had shewn, put entirely out of court by the fact that Lord Pembroke did not come to London till they had been actually written and read by Shakespeare to his friends.

It was not, however, her name that interested me. I was content to hold with Professor Dowden that “To the eyes of no diver among the wrecks of time will that curious talisman gleam.” What I wanted to discover was the nature of her influence over Shakespeare, as well as the characteristics of her personality. Two things were certain: she was much older than the poet, and the fascination that she exercised over him was at first purely intellectual. He began by feeling no physical passion for her. “I do not love thee with mine eyes,” he says:

“Nor are mine ears with thy tongue’s tune delighted;