[18] Mr. Beeching’s illustration of the friendship of the sonnets from the friendship of Gray and Bonstetten is worth pages of argument.
[19] In 125 the poet repudiates the accusation that his friendship is too much based on beauty.
[20] This does not imply that the Sonnets are as early as the Two Gentlemen of Verona, and much less that they are earlier.
[21] This seems to be referred to in lines by John Davies of Hereford, reprinted in Ingleby’s Shakespeare’s Centurie of Prayse, second edition, pp. 58, 84, 94. In the first of these passages, dated 1603 (and perhaps in the second, 1609), there are signs that Davies had read Sonnet 111, a fact to be noted with regard to the question of the chronology of the Sonnets.
[22] ‘Mistress Tearsheet’ too ‘would fain hear some music,’ and ‘Sneak’s noise’ had to be sent for (2 Henry IV., II. iv. 12).
[23] It is tempting, though not safe, to infer from the Tempest and the great passage in Pericles that Shakespeare must have been in a storm at sea; but that he felt the poetry of a sea-storm is beyond all doubt. Few moments in the reading of his works are more overwhelming than that in which, after listening not without difficulty to the writer of the first two Acts of Pericles, suddenly, as the third opens, one hears the authentic voice:
| Thou god of this great vast, rebuke these surges That wash both heaven and hell.... The seaman’s whistle Is as a whisper in the ears of death, Unheard. |
Knowing that this is coming, I cannot stop to read the Prologue to Act III., though I believe Shakespeare wrote it. How it can be imagined that he did more than touch up Acts I. and II. passes my comprehension.
I may call attention to another point. Unless I mistake, there is nothing in Shakespeare’s authorities, as known to us, which corresponds with the feeling of Timon’s last speech, beginning,
| Come not to me again: but say to Athens, Timon hath made his everlasting mansion Upon the beached verge of the salt flood: |