CHAPTER III
OF THE DIRECT TESTIMONY OF THE SONNETS AS TO WHO WAS NOT THEIR AUTHOR
Sonnets LV. and LXXXI. are as follows:
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmear'd with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgment that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes.
Or I shall live your epitaph to make,
Or you survive when I in earth am rotten;
From hence your memory death cannot take,
Although in me each part will be forgotten.
Your name from hence immortal life shall have,
Though I, once gone, to all the world must die:
The earth can yield me but a common grave,
When you entombed in men's eyes shall lie.
Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read;
And tongues to be your being shall rehearse,
When all the breathers of this world are dead;
You still shall live—such virtue hath my pen—
Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.
In all the plays and poems of Shakespeare, including these Sonnets, there is no mention of any man or woman then living. The only mention of a person then living made by our poet, either in prose or verse, is in the dedication of the two poems to the Earl of Southampton. To Shakespeare, to Shakespeare alone, have the Shakespearean poems and plays been a monument; and for him have they done precisely that which the poet says his "gentle verse" was to do for his friend; and they have not done so in any degree for any other.
An anonymous writer in Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, in August, 1852, seems to have been one of the first to suggest the doubt as to the authorship of the Shakespearean plays. His suggestion was that their real author was "some pale, wasted student ... with eyes of genius gleaming through despair" who found in Shakespeare a purchaser, a publisher, a friend, and a patron. If that theory is correct, the man that penned those Sonnets sleeps, as he said he would, in an unrecorded grave, while his publisher, friend and patron, precisely as he also said, has a place in the Pantheon of the immortals.
Very many of these Sonnets seem to be evolved from, or kindred to, the thought so sharply presented in Sonnets LV. and LXXXI. I would refer the reader particularly to Sonnets XXXVIII., XLIX., LXXI., LXXII, and LXXXVIII. The last two lines of Sonnet LXXI. are as follows:
Lest the wise world should look into your moan,
And mock you with me after I am gone.
The first lines of Sonnet LXXII. are as follows:
O! lest the world should task you to recite
What merit lived in me, that you should love
After my death, dear love, forget me quite,
For you in me can nothing worthy prove;
Unless you would devise some virtuous lie,
To do more for me than mine own desert,
And hang more praise upon deceased I
Than niggard truth would willingly impart: