The youth’s relations with the poet’s mistress.
Only in one group, composed of six sonnets scattered through the collection, is there traceable a strand of wholly original sentiment, not to be readily defined and boldly projecting from the web into which it is wrought. This series of six sonnets deals with a love adventure of no normal type. Sonnet cxliv. opens with the lines:
Two loves I have of comfort and despair
Which like two angels do suggest (i.e. tempt) me still:
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman colour’d ill. [153b]
The woman, the sonnetteer continues, has corrupted the man and has drawn him from his ‘side.’ Five other sonnets treat the same theme. In three addressed to the man (xl., xli., and xlii.) the poet mildly reproaches his youthful friend for having sought and won the favours of a woman whom he himself loved ‘dearly,’ but the trespass is forgiven on account of the friend’s youth and
beauty. In the two remaining sonnets Shakespeare addresses the woman (cxxxiii. and cxxxiv.), and he rebukes her for having enslaved not only himself but ‘his next self’—his friend. Shakespeare, in his denunciation elsewhere of a mistress’s disdain of his advances, assigns her blindness, like all the professional sonnetteers, to no better defined cause than the perversity and depravity of womankind. In these six sonnets alone does he categorically assign his mistress’s alienation to the fascinations of a dear friend or hint at such a cause for his mistress’s infidelity. The definite element of intrigue that is developed here is not found anywhere else in the range of Elizabethan sonnet-literature. The character of the innovation and its treatment seem only capable of explanation by regarding the topic as a reflection of Shakespeare’s personal experience. But how far he is sincere in his accounts of his sorrow in yielding his mistress to his friend in order to retain the friendship of the latter must be decided by each reader for himself. If all the words be taken literally, there is disclosed an act of self-sacrifice that it is difficult to parallel or explain. But it remains very doubtful if the affair does not rightly belong to the annals of gallantry. The sonnetteer’s complacent condonation of the young man’s offence chiefly suggests the deference that was essential to the maintenance by a dependent of peaceful relations with a self-willed and self-indulgent patron. Southampton’s sportive and lascivious temperament might easily impel him to divert to himself the attention of an attractive woman by whom he saw that his poet was fascinated,
and he was unlikely to tolerate any outspoken protest on the part of his protégé. There is no clue to the lady’s identity, and speculation on the topic is useless. She may have given Shakespeare hints for his pictures of the ‘dark lady,’ but he treats that lady’s obduracy conventionally, and his vituperation of her sheds no light on the personal history of the mistress who left him for his friend.