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The Secret Drama of Shakespeare's Sonnets
The Secret Drama of Shakespeare's Sonnets Author:Gerald Massey Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PRIMARY FACTS AND FUNDAMENTAL FALLACIES. Theoeizebs who seek to establish and perpetuate the belief that '' William Herbert" was the " Only Begetter " or obje... more »ctive inspirer of Shakspeare's Sonnets, as lumped together by Thorpe in his Inscription, are forced to ignore the most vital internal evidence and blink the most conclusive external data. Evidence within the Sonnets and from without; evidence poetic and historic ; evidence the most positive and irrefutable, can be offered to show that the mass of them (at least the first 86 as they stand) were composed at a period too early for William Herbert to have been the young friend who was so beloved by Shakspeare, and the patron to whom the Poet sent his earliest Sonnets, written by his " Pupil Pen," to " witness duty," to identify his present and to promise him his future work. It is not what I may say, or Messrs. Brown, Dowden, and Furnivall may surmise or profess to believe, but what are the facts of the case to be found in the Sonnets, corroborated by the testimony outside of them ? Is there any rock of reality on which we can build the bridge to cross a chasm hitherto impassable? At the outset the Sonnets plainly tell us that they had no " Only Begetter " in the sense of one sole ins/rirer, seeing that 'both sexes are addressed in them ; and both sexes must include at least two persons I Next they inform us, with Shakspeare for speaker, that many of them were written by the Poet with liis "Pupil Pen" before he had appeared in print with his Venus and Adonis in the year 1593. The 26th Sonnet is perfectly explicit on that point. " Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit, To thee I send this written embassogfl, To witness duty, not to show my wit: Duty so great which wit so poor as mine M...« less