To win me soon to hell, my female evil
Tempteth my better angel from my side,
And would corrupt my saint to be a devil.
In addressing the woman, the poet is much more outspoken than when addressing the man on
The pretty wrongs that liberty commits.
The poet, like Catullus with Lesbia, loves against his reason and his knowledge of the woman's true nature (CXLVII),
Past cure am I, now reason is past care,
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;
My thoughts and my discourse as madman's are,
At random from the truth vainly expressed;
For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.
If all this be in earnest, we have a tragedy of the heart, whether in 1594, or in 1598-1601, or in neither. Again and again, in his plays, Shakespeare mocks at sonnets and sonneteers; and though his, in parts, are personal, the depth of their significance, and the persistence of his emotions, must be left to the literary instinct of the reader. We cannot reconstruct Shakespeare's self out of his works, lyrical or dramatic. Had the sonnets been recognized as reflecting a scandalous episode in society, it could scarcely have followed that "no sequence of such poems was received more coldly". Those of Sidney, Daniel, Drayton, and Constable, were often reprinted. Shakespeare's had not even a second edition till 1640.[9]
It is unfortunate that literary history can scarcely pass by, leaving these strange guesses about a strange matter unnoticed. The sonnets in themselves are a book of golden verse, shining with gems of beautiful phrases,
The stretched metre of an antique song.
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
The painful warrior famoused for fight,
After a thousand victories once foiled.
Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye.
When in the chronicle of wasted time
I see descriptions of the fairest wights
And beauty making beautiful old rhyme
In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights.
Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.
This beautiful poem (CVII) most manifestly refers to Shakespeare's forebodings about "my true love," who was "supposed as forfeit to a confined doom" (Southampton, in 1601, was sentenced to captivity for life). But "The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured," that is Elizabeth, Cynthia, is dead, "Luna's extinct," as contemporary versifiers said. "In this most balmy time," Peace "proclaims olives of endless age," that is the accession of James VI and I put an end to fears of wars of a disputed succession. On 10 April, 1603, James released Southampton.[10] The Sonnets, like "the floor of heaven," are "thick inlaid with patines of bright gold,".never to be dimmed by mists of conjecture, or nonsense about Shakespeare as a sensual sycophantic snob, mad with jealousy and foiled desire.