“‘To Mr. W. H. Their onlie begetter.’
“The W stands for William, the H for Harriette. The prefix of ‘Mr.’ is a mere whimsicality, (a thing all lovers are guilty of, yet which we are ever ready to forgive), simply to mystify the world. The first twenty-six of these sonnets were written by Harriette during the years 1585 and 1586, before she knew that Shakespeare was already married; and the perplexity in her ignorance of the real facts of his life can be imagined.
“Long years after these letters were written, Shakespeare turned those which were not already in rhyme into verse for his and her amusement, and now that they had come to know each other perfectly and the oneness was complete, many was the laugh they had over their youthful trials. Anyone who will read the Sonnets, Venus and Adonis and the Passionate Pilgrim, and read them carefully in the light of what I now tell, will get a clear idea of the first few years’ relations of Shakespeare and this beautiful and accomplished young woman. I do not attempt to defend the style or wording of these poems. They are written in all the hot restless desire of youth where flesh is not ruled by soul—where the earthy is not yet transmuted into the spiritual.
“Said ‘rare Ben Jonson’—‘I loved the man, and do reverence his memory on this side of idolatry as much as any! He was honest and of an open and free nature, had an excellent fancy, brave notions and excellent expressions, wherein he flowed with such facility that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped. His wit was in his own power—would the rule of it had been so too! but he redeemed his vices with his virtues. There was in him ever more to be praised than pardoned. The players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare that in his writing whatsoe’er he penned he never blotted out a line. My answer has been, Would he had blotted out a thousand.’
“So with Ben Jonson I say, Oh would that these two had left unwritten a thousand lines!—but who shall dictate to genius?
“When Shakespeare left Stratford he attempted to leave the last year’s dwelling for the new—to steal the shining archway through—close up the idle door. The past was to him dead. He did not hug it to his heart, mourn over it, and attempt to kiss it back to life. He said, ‘The past we cannot recall, the future we cannot reach, the present only is ours.’ So with no attempt at concealment, yet with no disclosure of his history, he said to Harriette Bowenni:
“‘That I do love you, you do know; that I do desire to wed you, you may guess; and that I cannot is but fact. Now why should speak I more? You put your arms about my neck and swear your faith in pretty verse, and next you contradict this faith by still demanding Why? No! If I say it is not best, is not that Why enough?’
“In sonnet number twenty the appearance of Shakespeare is described at this time. A writer says, ‘He has a lady’s face and scarce a beard.’
“Harriette urged the youth to leave his shabby lodgings, marry her, and take up his abode with her and her mother; and in Venus and Adonis we hear of the number of noble lovers that had sought her hand, and yet she almost on her knees besought William to wed her. In a spirit of jolly ridicule of this wooing on the part of Harriette, he wrote the poem of Venus and Adonis and presented it to her. In this poem you will notice he represents himself as cold and unfeeling, when the real truth is he was just as full of desire to marry as she; but the divorce laws of England at that time were very strict, so much so that only the rich or influential could secure a divorce at all.
“Shakespeare should have been frank with this girl and told her his history at once, but he did not do so until over a year after their first acquaintance. You can well imagine the surprise of mother and daughter when he one night said, ‘Come, my history you would know. Well, I’ll run it through, even from my boyish days, to the very moment that you bade me tell it,’ and so he told from childhood to the time he took one last look at the little village and set his face toward London. The story being done she gave him for his pains a world of sighs. She swore in faith ’twas strange, ’twas passing strange, ’twas pitiful, ’twas wondrous pitiful! she wished she had not heard it. Yet she wished that heaven had made her such a man. She thanked him, and bade him if he had a friend that lov’d her, he should teach him how to tell the story, and that would woo her. On this hint he spake: