So much for facts about which there is no dispute; and now for a few of the most important questions concerning these poems over which editors, commentators, and critics have wrangled, and over some of which they will doubtless continue to wrangle to the last syllable of recorded time.

Was the edition of 1609 authorized or supervised by Shakespeare? So far as we know, the Venus and Adonis and the Lucrece are the only works that he himself ever published or saw through the press. They both contain formal dedications signed with his name, are carefully printed for that day, and the Lucrece at least, as the variations in different copies of the first edition clearly prove, was corrected by the author while on the press. The volume of Sonnets contains a dedication, but it is signed by the publisher, not the author, and the book abounds in errors of the type, most of which Shakespeare could not have failed to detect if he had supervised the printing. He was pretty certainly in London in 1609, and if he allowed these "sugred Sonnets" to be printed at all, he would surely have seen that they were printed well.

To my thinking, the question is settled by one little peculiarity in the printing of the 126th Sonnet, if sonnet it may be called. It has only twelve lines, and our friend Thorpe, assuming that a couplet had been lost, completed the normal fourteen lines by two blank ones enclosed in marks of parenthesis. Shakespeare could not have done this, and Thorpe would not have done it if he had been in communication with Shakespeare. In that case, he would have asked the poet for the couplet he supposed to be missing, and William would probably have told him that nothing was missing. The piece is not an imperfect sonnet of Shakespeare's pattern, but is made of six rhymed couplets, and the sense is apparently complete. No critic, so far as I am aware, has noted the significance of this little typographical fact, and it did not occur to me until I was preparing to write this paper.

Now, if Shakespeare had nothing to do, directly or indirectly, with the publication of the Sonnets by Thorpe, the fact has some important bearings, as we shall see further on.

To whom is the Dedication addressed, and what does it mean? It reads thus:

If Shakespeare had nothing to do with Thorpe's venture, the dedication is Thorpe's own, as it purports to be. But in what sense was "Mr. W. H.," whoever he may have been, "the onlie begetter" of the Sonnets? Begetter may mean either the person to whom the Sonnets owed their birth, or the one who got them together for publication-the person to whom they were originally addressed, or the one who collected and arranged them for Thorpe. The majority of critics take the word in the former and more familiar sense, while the minority cite examples of the other meaning from writers of the time, and argue plausibly for its adoption here. Both explanations have their difficulties, and it is not easy to decide between them. When I was editing the Sonnets, I was inclined to the second-taking begetter as equivalent to collector-but further study has led me to favor the other and simpler interpretation. The change does not in the slightest degree affect the opinions I have expressed as to the origin, the order, or the significance of the Sonnets. Who Mr. W. H. was, we shall probably never know; but if he was not

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the editor of the Sonnets, they had an editor about whom we know neither more nor less than about Mr. W. H.-not even less by the initials of his name, for whether the letters W. H. are the initials of a real name is a disputed point; there be those who think them a misprint for W. S., or a transposition of H. W., or letters taken at random as a mere blind."

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The vital question concerning this unknown editor is whether he was in the confidence of either the writer of the Sonnets or the person or persons to or for whom they were written. If he was not, his arrangement of the Sonnets is not an authoritative one; and that he was not is evident from the fact that he did not, and presumably could not, ask either the author or the addressee of the 126th Sonnet for that supposed lost couplet. His leaving that poem incomplete, as he believed it to be, simply confirms the opinion I expressed in my edition of the Sonnets, that he collected the Sonnets, and arranged them for the press as well as he could from what he knew of their history and from a study of the poems themselves. As I have said in my preface, "He seems to have known enough of their origin and their meaning to enable him to get them nearly in their proper order; but I suspect that if Shakespeare had read the proof-sheets, he might have made some transpositions." But before looking critically at the arrangement of the Sonnets, let us briefly consider the question whether they are autobiographical or not, the question to which all others relating to them are secondary and subordinate.

For myself, I firmly believe that the great majority of the Sonnets, to quote what Wordsworth says, "express Shakespeare's own feelings in his own person." I had often read and heartily loved the poems before I came to this conclusion; indeed, it was not until I carefully studied them with a view to editing them that I was fully converted to this view. It never occurred to me until now to reckon up the authorities on the two sides of the question. I had an impression that the majority favored the "personal" theory; but I am surprised to find it an overwhelming majority. Among the poets on this side are Words

worth, Coleridge, Sir Henry Taylor, Swinburne, Rossetti, and Victor Hugo. To these should be added Shelley, if I read aright a reference to the Sonnets in one of his poems, and Tennyson, if I may depend on what one of his friends has told me. On the other side I know of no poets but Browning (who, quoting Wordsworth's sonnet on the Sonnet, "with this same key Shakespeare unlock'd his heart," adds "Did Shakespeare? If so, the less' Shakespeare he!") and our own Stoddard. Of editors and critics, the chief who are on the "personal" side are Malone, Farmer, Tyrwhitt, Steevens, Drake, Hallam, Boaden, Armitage Brown, Knight, Collier, Furnivall, Trench, Dowden (the last last two both critics and poets), Palgrave, and Minto (who, however, excepts the Sonnets after the 126th); and to these are opposed only Staunton, Bolton Corney, Halliwell-Phillipps, Grant White, and Hudson. Among the Germans on the one side are Ulrici, Gervinus, Kreyssig, Hermann Isaac, and Sievers; and on the other Delius and Karl Elze. In this enumeration I do not include writers who, like Gerald Massey, hold certain mixed or muddled views, nor the out-andout "cranks," like the German Barnstorff, who takes W. H. to be "William Himself," and tells us that the poet in the Sonnets appeals from his mortal to his immortal part, and all that, or those who believe that he addresses the Spirit of Beauty or the Divine Logos, or Queen Elizabeth, or his own son-but not by Anne Hathaway-or who think that his dark mistress is "Dramatic Art, or the Catholic Church, or the Bride of the Canticles, black but comely." In a brief paper like this, one must not give much space to "the pranks of Puck among the critics," as Dowden calls them, laughable though they may be.

If the Sonnets are not of this personal character, are they mere exercises of the fancy, "the free outcome of a poetic imagination," as Delius phrases it? This theory is easy and specious at first, but lands us at last among worse perplexities than it evades. That Shakespeare, for example, should write seventeen sonnets urging a young man to marry and perpetuate his family is strange enough, but that he should select such a

theme as a fictitious basis for seventeen sonnets is stranger yet, and the same may be said of the story or stories underlying other of the poems. Some critics, indeed, who take them to be thus artificially inspired, have been compelled to regard them as satirical-intended to ridicule the sonneteers of the time, especially Drayton and Sir John Davies of Hereford. Others, like Professor Minto, who believe the first 126 to be personal and serious, regard the rest as "exercises of skill undertaken in a spirit of wanton defiance and derision of commonplace;" but only a critic hard pushed by his theory could detect irony where it had passed unsuspected from Shakespeare's time to ours. No unbiassed and fair-minded reader could see anything of the sort. "The poems." to quote Dowden again, "are in the taste of the time; less extravagant and less full of conceits than many other Elizabethan collections, more distinguished by exquisite imagination and all that betokens genuine feeling; they are, as far as manner goes, such sonnets as Daniel might have chosen to write if he had had the imagination and the heart of Shakespeare. All that is quaint or contorted or conceited' in them can be paralleled from passages of early plays of Shakspere, such as Romeo and Juliet and the Two Gentlemen of Verona, where assuredly no satirical intention is discoverable." If the Sonnets had been mere poetical exercises, it is passing strange that Shakespeare should not have published them ten years before they were brought out by the pirate Thorpe. He must have written them for publication if that was their character, and the extraordinary popularity of his earlier poems would have insured them a favorable reception with the public. It was, indeed, the success of Venus and Adonis and Lucrecethe 4th edition of the former being issued in 1599, and the second of the latter in 1598-which prompted Jaggard to compile the Passionate Pilgrim in 1799. It is a significant fact that he was able to rake together only ten poems which can possibly be Shakespeare's, and three of these were from Love's Labour's Lost. To these ten pieces he added ten* others, which he im

* Eleven, as ordinarily printed in editions of Shakespeare; but the two little pieces beginning "Good-night, good rest," and "Lord, how