His passion is so intense that he has no desire to paint her seduction as greater than it was. She has got into his blood, so to speak, and each drop of it under the microscope would show her image. Take any sonnet at haphazard, and you will hear the rage of his desire.
But what is the youth like?—“the master-mistress” of his passion, to give him the title which seems to have convinced the witless of Shakespeare's guilt. Not one word of description is to be found anywhere; no painting epithet—nothing. Where is the cry of this terrible, shameless, outrageous passion that mastered Shakespeare's conscience and enslaved his will? Hardly a phrase that goes beyond affection—such affection as Shakespeare at thirty-four might well feel for a gifted, handsome aristocrat like Lord Herbert, who had youth, beauty, wealth, wit to recommend him. Herbert was a poet, too: a patron unparagoned! “If Southampton gave me a thousand pounds,” Shakespeare may well have argued, “perhaps Lord Herbert will get me made Master of the Revels, or even give me a higher place.” An aristocratic society tends to make parasites even of the strong, as Dr. Johnson's famous letter to Lord Chesterfield proves. But let us leave supposition and come to the sonnets themselves, which are addressed to the youth. The first sonnet begins:
“From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty's rose might never die.”
This is a very good argument indeed when addressed to a woman; but when addressed to a man by a man it rings strained and false. Yet it is the theme of the first seventeen sonnets. It is precisely the same argument which Shakespeare set forth in “Venus and Adonis” again and again:
“Seeds spring from seeds and beauty breedeth beauty;
Thou wast begot; to get it is thy duty.”
“And so, in spite of death, thou dost survive,
In that thy likeness still is left alive ...”
(173-4.)
“Foul cankering rust the hidden treasure frets,
But gold that's put to use more gold begets.”
(767-8.)
At the end of the third sonnet we find the same argument:
“But if thou live, remember'd not to be,
Die single, and thine image dies with thee.”
Again, in the fourth, sixth, and seventh sonnets the same plea is urged. In the tenth sonnet the poet cries:
“Make thee another self, for love of me,
That beauty still may live in thine or thee.”
And again at the end of the thirteenth sonnet: